Dear Aussie, your PM received only 50,723 votes. Sit our election out.

In America, Michael Rowland is a comedian doing standup and hoping to snag a sitcom of his own like Tim Allen.

In Australia, Michael Rowland is a presenter on TV doing commentary on American politics. He has a foreign media understanding of American politics which consists of reading the New York Times and believing it.

The Aussie waded into how we elect our president. He drowned.

Rowland is upset that we have an Electoral College that determines our presidency instead of a direct election. This means the barbarians may be able to give the Orange Man Bad another term without having to get more votes than Willie Brown’s Old Squeeze.

Rowland wrote:

Getting more votes — even millions more than your opponent — isn't a guarantee of electoral success in the US.

Just ask Hillary Clinton and Al Gore.

They both won the popular vote: Gore by 500,000 in 2000 and Clinton by nearly 3 million in 2016. But they both lost the election.

As a candidate, no matter how well you do in the national political beauty contest, if you don't win the electoral college, you're in for an exceedingly disappointing election night.

“No other democracy chooses their presidents this way and most just go on a straight national vote,” says Ben Reilly, a visiting professor at the United States Studies Centre at Sydney University and an expert on electoral systems.

I can see where the Australian went wrong. He listened to an idiot.

America’s Electoral College system is not all that different from other nations in the Anglosphere. It is an Americanized version of the British Parliament electing a prime minister.

In fact that is how Australia elected (looks the name up) Anthony Albanese as its prime minister in 2022.

He received 50,723 votes — barely a majority in his district (Grayndler, South Wales) — in seeking re-election to Parliament in 2022. But once re-elected to that post, his party made him prime minister.

To be technical about it, the head of state of Australia is King Charles III who received no votes. There was, however, a time when kings were elected or at least had to pull a sword out of a stone. Albanese doesn’t look like he can pull a straw out of his purse.

Nevertheless, Rowland insisted that we backwoods rubes are doing this all wrong because our candidates are spending so much time in 7 of the 50 states.

We have these things called TVs that we can watch them on when they visit other states. I am pretty sure Rowland knows Australia has TVs too, given that he’s a presenter and all. Presidential candidates no longer have to travel the nation by rail car, stagecoach and tramp steamer to reach all the people.

Rowland wrote of America, “The popular vote does play a role in this process, in that the candidate who wins the most votes in any state sweeps all its electors. So, triumph in Texas and get 40 electors. Succeed in South Carolina and take home 9.

“Like every election year, a handful of so-called swing states will determine the outcome in 2024. And that's why Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are spending most of their time in the key electoral battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And the contest in each is, at this stage, very tight.”

He did not explain why Texas gets 40 electors and South Carolina gets 9. It reflects population.

But each state gets a minimum of 3 electors because that reflects sovereignty. DC gets 3 votes too. Ours is a nation that is 50 states united — and not a nation divided into 50 states.

And should there be a tie in the Electoral College, the Aussie will really freak out because each state will get only one vote to determine the presidency. Democrats are still pissed that John Quincy Adams defeated Andrew Jackson this way 200 years ago.

States do not have to hold direct elections for presidents. Legislatures once selected the electors and they actually met, mulled over the choices and unanimously agreed on George Washington. Then they drank a few casks of madeira wine. We were a proper if not exactly sober country back then.

South Carolina was the last state to give up having its legislators select the electors. I am not sure that was such a bad idea.

Americans have a binary electoral system. Other countries do not, which results in coalition governments made up of parties that could not win a majority of the votes.

I am ambivalent about it because on the one hand, it forces the head of state to toe the line to please everyone in the coalition in order to remain PM, but on the other hand, the system is ripe for corruption, which is why so many countries are nonbinary.

Rowland is not the only foreign journalist without a sense of self-awareness who is putting our system down.

Ana Lucía González Paz, Garry Blight and Sam Levine of the Guardian wrote, “In recent years there has been growing criticism of the electoral college system in the US because it has allowed a tiny number of Americans to determine the outcome of the presidential election.

“In 2020, about 43,000 votes among Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — a mere 0.03% of the votes cast nationwide — allowed Joe Biden to win. In 2016, about 80,000 combined votes gave Donald Trump his winning margins in key swing states.”

Britain’s prime minister (looks the name up) Keir Starmer was re-elected to his seat in parliament on July 4 with 18,884 votes in his district and then given the top job the next day.

But he is acting like he carried a Reichstag election in a landslide. The joke goes: “Herr Starmer visited a rural farm yesterday, the farmer said, ‘He was very nice but he seemed very interested in watching the goosesteps.’ ”

Journalists in Canada and elsewhere seem more worried about Donald Trump than they are their own prime ministers. And we are watching the rise of a Soviet state in Canada and elsewhere.

I am not saying that is the case in Australia because I don’t know much about its politics and I really don’t care to learn. Ben Franklin pushed to have as our national motto Mind Your Business.

So I am advising Rowland to mind his business and worry about what’s going down Down Under instead of another place halfway across the world. This is our election, not his.

He should care about the president of the United States as much as I care about the prime minister of Australia.

* * *

I suppose I should say something about last night’s presidential debate but I didn’t watch it. I will outsource the analysis to PJ Media’s Stephen Green, who asked, “Can anyone stand to listen to THAT VOICE for the next four or eight years?”

Voice is a problem for women presidential/vice presidential candidates because they sound shrill. Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin needed work and Hillary often sounds like she should be riding a broom. Kamala is hopelessly terrible.

Here’s a suggestion for gals who want to be the chief of the executive branch of government: Listen to vintage Kathleen Turner or Lauren Bacall. Imitate.

Also, hire better makeup artists. Hillary’s occasionally turns the sow’s ear into a Kmart purse but again, Kamala needs help. Really. Truly.

Who won the debate? Right after it ended, Taylor Swift endorsed her and immediately changed the subject.