The problem is two-fold. The majority of Americans are passively informed, and the majority of our news publications are compromised by wealthy owners.

Also, it’s two months, not three. Early voting ballots go out in the end of September.

People making a choice isn't the hard part. All 51 different territories having different rules for their elections is the hard part.

After enough elections, you get tired of picking the party that aligns with you on 4% of issues because it's ever so slightly higher than the other party which aligns with you on 0.5%.

Or hopefully, this time around, a Queen

Lasting shorter than a letuce

In a parliamentary system, Prime Ministers aren't elected by popular vote, but instead chosen by Parliament. It's basically like if the Speaker of the House were also the President.

Fun fact: the US system was originally designed to work sort of that way, except they wanted the President to be chosen by all the state legislatures instead of Congress, for extra Federalist separation of powers. That's what the Electoral College is for: they couldn't do "one state rep = one vote" because each state has different numbers of constituents per rep and such, so they needed a "compatibility layer."

Then states immediately fucked up the plan by holding popular votes for Electors instead of having the legislature appoint them, and the rest is history.

There are also semi-presidential republics, which function differently. In those systems, the US-style president role is split into two different roles, president & prime minister. President handles foreign policy, the army and selects the prime minister with the approval of parliament, and the prime minister handles everything domestic. This separation of roles means the amount of damage an individual can do is much more limited.

Edit: Oh, I missed somebody already talked about the French system, which is a semi-presidential system. Oh well, leaving this up for posterity.

if it was up to the average american, we wouldn't have that shit. unfortunately our society is puppeted by the rich to a very unhealthy degree at the moment. i hope that changes soon and maybe give us the opportunity to revolution some of them away.

But it can also go horribly wrong. For example, Cameron called the Brexit referendum without wanting Brexit, which did not go as planned

I wish it was only a year. Lately it’s been about a 4 year cycle for the presidential race

One positive on the Dutch coalition talks. We can always say that our southern neighbours take even longer...

On a more serious note, the last three coalition talks in the Netherlands took over 200 days, with one taking 299 days. Sure, not even close to over 500 days in Belgium, but how the hell does this happen?

You can have 5 times more people counting votes and organizing things. I dont understand this excuse. Democracy can scale, especially nowadays with technology.

European Parliament elections were like a couple of months ago.

They wouldn't need to visit each country, they don't even bother caring about more than 4 states in the US!