Direct election - Citizendia

Direct election is a term describing a system of choosing political officeholders in which the voters directly cast ballots for the person, persons or political party that they desire to see elected. The method by which the winner or winners of a direct election are chosen depends upon the electoral system used. A voting system allows voters to choose between options often in an Election where candidates are selected for public office. The most commonly used systems are the plurality system and the two round system for single winner elections, such as a presidential election, and party-list proportional representation for the election of a legislature. The plurality voting system is a Single-winner voting system often used to elect executive officers or to elect members of a legislative assembly which is based on single-member The two-round system (also known as the second ballot or runoff voting) is a Voting system used to elect a single winner Party-list proportional representation systems are a family of Voting systems used in multiple-winner Elections (e A legislature is a type of representative Deliberative assembly with the power to create amend and change Laws The law created by a legislature is called Legislation

Examples of directly elected bodies are the European Parliament and the United States Senate (since 1917). The European Parliament ( Europarl or EP) is the only directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union (EU The United States Senate is the Upper house of the bicameral United States Congress, the Lower house being the House of Representatives

By contrast in an indirect election, the voters cast elect an assembly which in turn elects the officeholder in question. Some examples of indirectly elected bodies would include:

the Parliamentary Assemblies of the Council of Europe, OSCE, the WEU and NATO - in all of these cases, voters elect national parliamentarians, who in turn elect some of their own members to the assembly
the election of the government in most parliamentary systems - the voters elect the parliamentarians, who then elect the government from among themselves
the German Bundesrat, where voters elect the Landtag members, who then elect the state government, which then appoints its members to the Bundesrat
the election of the US President is technically indirect -- the voters elect the electoral college, who then elects the President -- although in practice it resembles a direct election for most purposes. The Council of Europe (Conseil de l'Europe is the oldest International organisation working towards European integration, being founded in 1949 The Western European Union ( WEU) is a partially dormant European defence and security organization established on the basis of the Treaty of Brussels of 1948 The North Atlantic Treaty A parliamentary system, also known as parliamentarianism (and parliamentarism in American English) is a System of government in which The Bundesrat ("federal council" or "upper house of German parliament" is the representation of the 16 Federal States ( Bundesländer) of A Landtag ( Diet) is a representative assembly or Parliament in German-speaking countries with some legislative authority The President of the United States is the Head of state and Head of government of the United States and is the highest political official in United States by The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would cause the Electoral College result to mirror the national popular vote. National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement among U
most bodies formed of representatives of national governments, e. g. the United Nations General Assembly, can be considered indirectly elected (assuming the national governments are democratically elected in the first place, which is often not the case). Membership For two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly see General Assembly members

See also