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@clacksee He'll last his full term (or at least until he's incapacitated or dies in office) because the bug in the US system was a feature back in 1789: with no telegraph, electoral processes had to run on a calendar determined far in advance (because travel times across the original colonies were measured in weeks to months). They could have changed it after the 1850s, but saw no reason to do so. And now the electoral lockstep has doomed the United States: it's game over.

@cstross
Fully agree. But also, I’d never considered the reason for the fixed election dates. Canada is much larger than the US but uses the Westminster system. But then, by 1867, telegraphs were relatively common.

@clacksee Yup. The first telegraphs were optical ones in France in the 1790s, but horrendously expensive, low bandwidth, and could potentially be tampered with (election interference). It took the electrical telegraph in the late 1830s to make it viable for election count reporting.