The US presidential elections are unequal in their essence; the situation refers to the period of slavery in several states of the country in the nineteenth century, Brazilian experts said in an interview to Sputnik. They analyzed the electoral process in the US and compared it to the Brazilian system.
One of the important features of US presidential elections is the Electoral College, a group of people consisting of 538 American citizens, usually senators, members of the House of Representatives, and prominent politicians. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the president.
According to Carlos Eduardo Martins, a researcher at the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, the electoral process in Brazil is direct, but in the US, citizens don't elect their leader by voting at the polls, which he says promotes inequality. He believes that this discrepancy between popular representation and who is actually elected as president is not a side effect of the indirect voting system in the United States, but rather the reason it was created.
The expert pointed out that the electoral college, which developed during the slavery era, was created so that the southern states, which had a considerable enslaved population that did not have the right to vote, would not be underrepresented in the federal executive branch.
The researcher recalled that although in the 1960s an electoral reform was carried out that gave the right to vote to everyone, the US has a policy of mass incarceration that mainly affects the black population.
Another expert, Roberto Goulart Menezes, professor of international relations at the University of Brasília, said that the American elections are aimed at keeping the oligarchy in power. He highlighted that in the US, the candidates have to choose which type of financing to use for their campaigns: public or private.
"And this private financing, of course, is in the interests of large economic groups," Menezes said.
Martins underscored that private campaign financing has an absolutely decisive weight in the electoral results.
"Around 400 families in the United States are responsible for more than half of the spending on election campaigns. These families decide who will be elected and who will not," said Martins.