Politics / Government - murica

What's this nonsense? Of course independents can vote, they're a huge block of the entire voting population, and there are no such things as superdelegates in US elections. There are electors that you vote for, which can technically go ahead and just vote for whichever party they want, but in practice they don't do it if it would change the outcome.

Only primaries have superdelegates, because primaries are run by privately funded parties to choose candidates, not to choose who actually has power. I'm not aware of any other country that even has primary races; everywhere else the parties just pick their candidates internally and people have to make do with whoever they pick. In the UK, party members can vote for who will lead the party, which is sort of like a primary, but you have to pay an annual fee to be a party member, and as a result only a tiny portion of the population actually do.

But the college means that the votes of individual people in small states are literally more valuable than those in large states. I get the idea of wanting the smaller states to have agency, but this can lead to ridiculous situations like a candidate becoming president despite not even having the most people voting for them.

There's also the really terrible issue of how electors are assigned winner-take-all although that's not actually inherent to the electors system and is instead just a weird policy that most states have taken.