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by thomk 2324 days ago
Sorry could you expand on that a bit more? You only vote on one thing at a time?
2 comments

Typically you’ll only be dealing with elections: General Election, Local Election, Mayoral Election, Regional Parliament Election, (until recently) European Parliament election.

Each of these is a different piece of paper, but on any given Election Day it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see three at once.

UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative. Everything else (who wins the Government, what issues get passed, etc.) is derived from this single point.
> UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative

That's true at the level of national government, but there are separate elections for different levels of government.

It's as if in the US you voted just for the House of Representatives, the Senate was unelected (which, get, historically it was) and the House elected the President.

Instead, the US started out with the same thing, except we elect an entire separate body (because we still didn't trust the people to do that, plus we wanted to make sure that citizens of slave states were overrepresented in executive elections as well as in the Senate) just to elect the President, and then later we decided to make the Senate accountable directly to the state electorate, too.

So you do not personally vote on (as an example) how much money goes to schools? Your representative does that voting for you. Is that correct?
You are correct. The typical voter does not vote on how much money goes to schools.
The UK is a representative democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy).
So is the United States.