Is there a lore reason why American elections are so convoluted?
Are they stupid?
The founding fathers were afraid of the "tyranny of the masses" so they intentionally designed every step of the US government to be as conservative and undemocratic as possible. It is less stupid and more malice which drove our cluster fuck today.
Also Madison.
The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from, and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.
Yeah, it makes much more sense when taken in the context of them all being wealthy landowners, many of whom owned slaves
our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation.
We really are living up to what the founding fathers wanted whodathunkit 
Founding Fathers specifically designed the system to be this way in order to limit the control of people not in the ruling class. Over time it has accumulated a lot of crust as many small changes have been made, but its never been totally overhauled to make sense and it has always remained in line with what the founders intended, more or less.
Yep, the people who claim America is actually a democracy are coping. It’s an oligarchic republic with a facade of democracy.
if it's about america, guessing racism or classism will get you 99% of the way to the correct answer
Sorry the glorious workings of our democracy are too beautiful in their complexity for your simple mind to appreciate
As with most things in amerikkka, the answer is to screw over either black people, the poor, or women.
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They're convoluted so that the capitalist class can more easily rig them. Things like the electoral college, gerrymandering, loose campaign finance laws, 2 party system, etc. are the way they are so the people in power can stay in power, while at the same time still claiming it is "democracy" because they are still technically following the rules. And it was pretty much like this from the beginning. The US was never about freedom, except for white males who own property.
No, it's a convoluted system that was designed specifically to fool people with the illusion of democracy and in reality keep power in hands of more or less steady oligarchy. Not accidentally usians are frothing and calling it "REPUBLIC" when you talk with them about "democracy" because it's been modelled on a late Roman Republic where circa 0,5% of citizens had real influence on the state.
There really was no illusions made when it was first set up. It was explicitly stated that even common land owners were not to be democratically trusted. The illusions come later as the system is reformed and the antidemocratic measures were wallpapered over.
Fun fact: Romans invented gerrymandering. They were signing in all the new citizens to just few of the tribes, just in case the new ones actually went to Rome for any voting in those comitia. Imagine something like having 100 million people in constituencies for everyone not living in DC.
Primaries in the US are real Americana.
They are covered on tv in a weird way that's part spectacle, part like sports coverage, and there's some odd solemnity too. It's typical for reporters and talking heads to use words like "duty" when discussing voting.
The last primary worth watching this year will probably be the GOP South Carolina primary which happens on February 24th. For the presidency it's Trump vs. Haley. South Carolina is Haley's home state. She'll probably get crushed by the Trump train that day, she'll soon drop out, and then primary season will effectively end. And - of course - the next presidential primaries will be four long years from now.
To watch them - there are pirate streams like this - https://livenewsof.com/msnbc-live-stream/. I have no idea why some pirate domains like that one aren't forced to shut down and continue year after year.
I'll leave this there...
[Robert] Bellah posits that Americans have come to see the document of the United States Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, as cornerstones of a type of civil religion or political religion.
I don't know if the page discusses it but there was no "two party" stuff when the founding fathers were around. The two party concept baked into many American brains to the scary degree. They think it's appropriate and even righteousness. Some Americans are afraid to think of a future without it even if their belief in it makes no sense at all. And liberals love to talk about the "good old days" when there were "good" republicans. A related comment of mine. It poisons their brains to the point they see George W. Bush as a good guy.
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Ninja edit
Another problem is the bipartisan love and worship of the idea of American exceptionalism.
The idea that primaries are open to the general public and not just paid up party members (or, even internal selection committees with only indirect accountability to the rank and file members) is wild. The US doesn't have political parties in the real sense that other countries do, unless of course the "Wrong" candidate gets voted in.
Due to federalism - each state is different. Some have open primaries and some don't. Iowa doesn't even have a primary. They have a caucus. It's not open - each party has its own thing. It's... Haha - it's too hard for me to explain.
Explainer: How the Iowa caucuses work - YouTube
What's not explained is there's a lot of yelling in the gym to try to get people to go from one candidate's "team" to another. It's a pretty silly thing to do in the era of the internet for a nation of 340 million people. Also - Iowa and New Hampshire have very small populations and they are far from being demographically representative. They are very white states.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
There's the electoral college which was set up deliberately as an antidemocratic measure by the founding fathers. More so than it is now. But we haven't gotten to that stage of the season yet.
Right now we're in the primaries, which is an entirely ad-hoc system made up on a party by party, state by state basis. Each state decides when the primaries happen and what form of election they will be. Each party decides how those results will be counted in their own convention. There's little to no federal regulation regarding the primary process. The end result is a year long spectacle.
Of course this season we're being denied the spectacle for a shitty rerun.
Is there a reason why any given state couldn't just set their primary to be the same day as Iowa's, increasing their influence in the primary season?
There's an incredibly stupid Iowa state law saying their caucus has to be at least 8 days before any primary.
There's a similarly stupid New Hampshire state law saying their primary has to be at least 7 days before any other primary.
Those laws don't actually mean anything, and doubly so because there's actually no law saying primaries have to take place at all.
The Democratic and Republican parties put out their own schedules of what states get to go first, and if any state breaks the rules the results don't count.
This year the Democratic party said South Carolina is supposed to be the first primary, but New Hampshire set theirs first anyway, and so Biden wasn't on the ballot and the New Hampshire results don't count.
Yes, I refer you to Hogeland's Founding Finance about how the Revolutionary war was built on a number of economic interests of the US HB and planter classes, which made use of popular discontent before crushing that populist sentiment both during and after the revolution.
Famously, the only reason the Declaration of independence was even made was because a bunch of Working Class popular committees that had wrestled control of the city were meeting upstairs and were about to beat the convention to it.
Bread and circuses. Keep the masses deluded into thinking elections mean something to divert them from actually demanding any real change.
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The systems were set up such that a landowning and lawyer class would be the policymakers indefinitely. The "burden" of "democracy" was self-imposed by that class over the colonial period where they'd have town halls and shit to heir grievances to each other and the mayor or governor would tell them to fuck off or find some way to meet their needs.
Only those with means would have the time to do any of these things. It was a new gentry system, but one that depended more on wealth itself over heritage or a title from a monarch. Poor people, i.e. the vast majority of people, were too busy working or taking care of themselves or simply having no capacity to engage because they could not read or write or pay for education.
The system is still fundamentally the same, just with a few tweaks here and there. More people can vote but the policymaking power is still in the hands of the economic ruling class and still this is the people with the time to spend on this shit or to hire lobbyists and lawyers to do it for them. Poor people still can't engage even though they can read and write because they have even less "free time" and must contend with a massive propaganda machine to try and figure out what is going on and what to do about it.
The same reason why wrestlers have elaborate origin stories, web of rivalries and conflicts, and plan their appearance and performance to manipulate the crowd
Make work program for lifelong lanyards.
Keep them out of any job where they could fuck up anything that matters.
Originally they were held in a way to expedite the process instead of bringing all the ballots to one location for counting. This quirk later became enshrined because of conservatism.
For political parties and primaries, there was no model at all in the foundation of the country, and there was actually an inclination amongst the founders against having political parties at all. Moreover, the 10th Amendment pretty clearly puts the individual states in control of party formation rather than the federal government. Hence why you'll have a D or R party in each state that's relatively independent.
The FPTP method of elections ensures that everything will drift towards 2 opposing parties.
So we have the Electoral College, and we have political parties with make-it-up-as-you-go structures that end up being rather byzantine. What parallels this is increasing pressures to lengthen the election season. A longer election season means that small parties and poorer candidates are effectively shut out, and moneyed interests will naturally favor this: spending more money on elections is worth it if it ensures candidates friendly to them are winning all the time.