Daily Dose of English 219
Election Day
Daily Dose of English 219
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to avoid, what? Why did I say that word? To improve your English. That was a weird word to come out, a slip of the tongue, if you will, where you can improve your English. The transcripts for all episodes and more are on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're talking about election day, which is kind of crazy. So election day, for those of you who don't know, is the day where we vote on, in the U.S., where we vote on a lot of different public officials, especially the president, which is what is the most followed, not necessarily the most important, probably not the most important race, presidential race or electoral race, as we call it. And it always happens on, it's not always the same date, I don't think. It's always a specific, no, is it? Wait, hang on, let me just double check this. Election day, US. I think it's a specific time of year, not a specific date. But let me just double check that. Oh, I didn't want to look at the, no, this is gonna be, i don't know how to find this information um it's always giving me 2020 it's giving me 2024 stuff um but it says well it's on it's today i know that's that's true um well the day i'm recording this like a week ish before election day in the u.s okay wait here it is general elections that are uh the tuesday after the first monday in november um wow what a weird choice. So the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November is election day. There we go. I figured it out. So I was right. It's not always the same date. It's not necessarily like the 5th of November, which it is this year. It changes between the 2nd and the 8th. And I guess that Tuesday thing is they don't, the first, the Tuesday after the first Monday is they don't want it to be the first day of the month, I guess, for some reason, if like if Tuesday ends up being the first, but I don't know why. That's a very strange thing. Why not just make it a specific day? Anyways, an interesting thing about the U.S. is that it is not a federal holiday. So a lot of countries give people the day off like as a federal holiday, saying that nobody has to work this day, everybody votes. That's that you should vote. That does not happen in the U.S. You actually don't get the day off necessarily. Many employers do give the day off, although not all of them, not even close to all of them. It's relatively normal to at least get like a couple of hours off to go vote or something like that. And there are some states that have it as a holiday, but a state holiday, not a federal holiday, which is the important thing there. which is really weird. It just feels like that. It just should be a holiday, especially because it's always on a Tuesday, which is like a great day to go vote and whatnot. And the main idea is that you vote on that day, votes are then counted, and then the race is decided on that day. And that is not necessarily what happens nowadays or in the recent couple years or not years like elections which are over the course of every four years in the US we have we have presidential elections every four years. There are other elections for local governments or other governments in the U.S. So like your congressman or whatever, those can happen more often and whatnot. But Election Day is the is the important federal one for the president. Um, and. We talked about the electoral college a couple of episodes ago, but that's also a very important piece of us elections and is playing a huge role in this year's election. Because, uh, what happens is this electoral college basically means that individual people don't necessarily vote states vote. And then as a whole, those states is votes is get added to a, a total, which, which actually matters for the presidential race. And so each state has a different number of votes depending on its population, and then those votes then go to the winner. But the thing is, a lot of US states always vote the same. So for example, I'm from Oregon, and Oregon has voted for the Democratic Party basically every single year. It is essentially a guaranteed Democratic vote. This is one of the big problems with the US elections always being between two parties, is that it is pretty much impossible to get 80% of the states to ever change their votes. They always go to one of the two parties, either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. However, there is a small section of states, a handful of states, which are what we call swing states because they do go between the two different parties and it depends on the year. And so what happens is that a massive amount of time, energy, and money is spent on getting votes in those states because they're basically the ones that actually matter. which can be very frustrating to people from other states where it's like, okay, you didn't really, you aren't earning my vote necessarily, but you're getting it anyways, which is one of the, there's a lot of problems with the US democracy system. It is not actually as democratic of a country as other democratic countries, which is not great. definitely better than many countries that aren't democratic, but claim to be, but there are still many problems that can be fixed. And we're probably going to be seeing those on big display this year. So I haven't, um, uh, well, I'm not in the future, so I haven't, I don't actually know how the election is going. But what we've seen for the past, basically since Trump started running, is this new thing of like election denial and election deniers and people trying to undermine the election process in the US and causing a very small amount of people causing problems. However, we've also seen this going back all the way to 2000 with the race between Al Gore and George Bush. I think that's right. Where that was, that was, there was a, it's, it's guaranteed that there was fishy stuff happening and that Al Gore should not have just lost but he did because there were because if you get a lot of people in certain places in the government there is not a ton that you can do even if they're just committing fraud. And we are very likely to see similar things happen. There has been, throughout the last couple of years, there have been states trying to reduce voting ability and to add more difficulty into the voting process, already claiming that things are rigged and have problems. And it is almost exclusively coming from the Republican Party. And we also even see them engaging in outright like vote buying which is the big thing that has started happening in the past like week or so when I'm recording this where there are like lotteries and raffles and free money to people that sign a petition. The petition is just saying that they support the constitution which is It's very clearly a way to buy more votes for a specific party, because it's talking about a specific part of the Constitution, the right to bear arms and the right to free speech. And that is the thing that has been sort of the rallying cry for the Republican Party for the last well a long time quite a while actually even though neither of those are really under true attack at all it's a pretty much fabricated issue but yeah it's this whole thing it's going to be very interesting to see there is a lot of people are quite worried about this election and i think it's with a good reason because Trump basically wants to never have elections again. He's actually said that. He said that you won't have to vote again. After I'm president, you won't have to vote again, which is not how democracy works. We vote every four years on a president and there's a limit to it. And we see in other countries where that doesn't happen, where the president just changes the rules and like, I'm just president forever now. It's like, okay, that's not how a democratic system should work. And we're seeing lots of things like that people being put in positions of power. There's a couple of states where there's like people in put in charge of some elect of election things who have no business being in charge of election things people that that are saying that the elections are improper, that they're wrong. There's so much small suspicious stuff going on in many, especially swing states and whatnot, that it is very clear of an attempt to undermine and have more power and delay results. And so I think that's probably what we're going to see, is that there is a massive delay in the results that come in. So it is very likely that today on election day that this episode comes out, that there will not be a final number, despite it being very clear or quite, actually it might not be clear because a lot of the polls are very, very close. um together which is kind of worrying because yeah it's like there's there's a pretty good video um by a a lawyer sort of about why this election is so important it's on youtube by legal eagle um and it's a it's a good rundown and essentially saying that There's not really a choice in this election on policy. You can not necessarily like the policies of the Democratic Party of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. However, if they don't win, an actual convicted felon will win with a bunch of other cronies that he wants to get into positions of power to create more power and more wealth for certain people like it is not really about policy at all this year which is kind of messed up and kind of scary and so it's It's a very important election in a lot of ways, just because it's not like, oh, the person that has the worst policy is going to get elected, or the person that I don't like is going to be elected. It's not really about that this year, which is not good, because you want elections to be about getting the best for the country, rather than having the option being, we keep existing as a democratic country and everything's going to be probably fine or somebody that really wants to change these things and wants to have more power and put more people in and like get rid of important people and all sorts of things is not a good choice to have. Um, and so yeah, that's what we're looking at. I am, I've already kind of given up on the U.S. ever making reasonable progress for what I consider to be good progress, but we'll have to see. And I am very hopeful that things don't go horribly wrong, um, in the next decade or so in the U.S. because I'm still from there. I'm not going to, can't get away from it. My, my family lives there. My parents live there. Um, and so. Yeah, we'll see what the hell happens. But anyways, that's everything that I have for today. I hope that you, I don't know, enjoyed this episode. And if you're in the future, I hope that things have gone well. You probably don't care as much because you probably aren't American or else you'd speak English natively, very likely. So anyways, let me know your thoughts as a foreigner down in the comments below. That's everything for me today. I hope that you enjoyed and I will see you again tomorrow for a brand new episode because we're going to keep going regardless of the elections. I'll see you then. Have a good one. Bye.
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