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Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

Issued on January 20th, 2021.... Didn't Joe Biden just win the popular vote with 51.3% on... November 3rd, 2020, over two months ago? Why does the US political system wait months to enact the peoples' will? I don't understand this at all.

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It's an artifact of history, when 200 years ago it may have taken weeks for states to count votes, certify and send representatives with the results, assuming they made it to the capital and didn't die during travel when their horse fell into a river or something...

Plus, once confirmed (on the 6th), it does take some time to change cabinets etc.

A. We did not know anything on Nov 3

B. There is a process in the US that involves state electors having their votes counted and certified and the new government installed

C. No country in the world instantly swaps governments at election result time.

It's pretty swift in a number of European countries, days not weeks.

Fact is the civil service is not being swapped, just the political leaders of the departments. Perfectly fine to just swap ministers in a matter of days.

Assuming the newly elected parliament can agree on a government. This is not always so easy, Belgium are famous for not having a government for years at a time.

This is not a 'Europe is different from USA' thing. Each country/system is peculiar in its own way.

The core of the issue is that the US president has way too much power and does replace a large number of civil service positions. "Just after the presidential election, a revised edition of the Plum Book is published, which lists over 9,000 federal civil service leadership and support political appointment positions which an incoming administration needs to review, and fill or confirm."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_presidential_transition

> It's pretty swift in a number of European countries, days not weeks.

Unlikely. After election, coalition negotiation starts and that took weeks or months. Only after a new coalition is negotiated then a new government may be voted in by MPs.

For example last EU elections was 2019-05, while new commission was voted in 2019-11.

Is this a serious question? This is what most systems do right? Hold an election and then the newly elected sit at some later point in time.

Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?

Yeah, it's a serious question. In the 2015 Canadian General Election[0] the new Prime Minister and cabinet were sworn in two weeks later (though others seem to be often about a month later). I recently saw someone talking about their country swearing in the new party the actual next day(!), though I can't seem to find what country that was. Two months seems crazy to me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Canadian_federal_election

I believe, in many parliamentary systems the parliament is dissolved first after which government becomes a caretaker government and cannot enact major new policy changes. After an election is held, new members of parliament are elected and must form a governing coalition that has a majority of the members (sometimes with one party, sometimes with multiple parties) can select a new prime minister and start governing in earnest. Sometimes, they cannot come to an agreement on a governing coalition and they continue without a government for a while until they can. Belgium is infamous for having gone years without a real government that can enact policy due to their failure to establish a majority coalition. This is however very unusual.

Over the past couple years I'm strongly starting to believe that this is a better system of government than the US republican[1] model.

[1] by republican, I mean of a republic, not the GOP

> Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?

I think GP is asking why it's 2 months instead of something like 2 weeks.

> Or are you suggesting the second we know the winner the previous president should be booted out?

It's not a terrible idea to prevent them from signing new legislation or doing anything else of massive importance. If it was worth doing, it should've been done before the election so that voters had all the information before casting their votes.

It's actually extremely unusual how long the period is between elections and elected officials taking office in the United States.

In the UK, a new Prime Minister will generally be in power within 24 hours of the election ending. Three months seems insane in contrast.

Huh, as a Canadian it's usually a month or more. Which is odd considering we adopted your system.

So, most developed democracies are parliamentary democracies, and don't have executive presidents. In that case, it's normally pretty rapid. For instance, Ireland held a general election on the 8th of Feb 2020, the 32nd Dail was dissolved on the 14th of Feb 2020, and the 33rd Dail convened on the 20th. In that particular case, the cabinet (the executive) stayed in power as a caretaker government for months afterwards (and took major decisions over covid) because the new Dail struggled to either appoint a new prime minister or call a new election (covid was unhelpful there), but that's very abnormal.

In presidential and quasi-presidential systems, it typically takes a week or so. The US really is an anomaly here.

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