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I vote in both Iceland and the US. I like the way things work in Iceland... there are 6 parties, and not one of them ever gets a majority (for example, in last year's parliamentary elections, the most popular party got less than 40%). But as long as a party gets at least 5% of the vote, then they receive a proportional number of seats in the parliament. What I like is that since there is no majority party, there ALWAYS has to be a coalition between 2-3 parties in order to make up a majority. So the most popular party usually ends up striking some kind of deal with the next most popular, or with the next couple of parties down, until a majority is reached. This forces people to work with each other, even if the platforms are quite different from one other.
When I voted last year, I went down to the city hall and went into a booth. There was a sheet of paper with 6 small boxes on it... I put an X in the Left-Green party's box (immigration is a dominant issue for me here, and while the Social Democrats also are pro-immigration, the Left-Greens actually invited a fledgling Immigrant Party to join them the year before, and I appreciated that), and left. That was it. The entire parliamentary election process. Individuals are not really that important, though people do get "seated" (kind of like in an orchestra... 1st chair, 2nd chair, etc), and they only get a spot in parliament if their party wins enough seats to include them.
The other thing about Iceland, or at least as I was taught in my Icelandic history class, is that it's not just right-left (and here, even the furthest "right" party would still be pretty center/left-of-center in the US)... it's more of a 2-dimensional scale, with right-left on the horizontal, and isolationism vs. engagement on the vertical. This is because Iceland has always been on the margins of Europe (and the US, in a way), so deciding whether or not to engage with the world at large has always been a central issue for them. Right now, they still can't decide if they want to join the EU or not, and that would be another issue along that vertical line. Not all issues are conservative vs. liberal, so the parties have to branch out along that 2D scale.
Anyway, as for the US... well, I never make any hard and fast decisions until I've watched the campaigns for a while, read a lot about the candidates, listened to them speak, ignored propaganda about them (both positive and negative), and then make a decision. Overall, though, I suppose I have a bias towards people who come across as being more intelligent than I am, and not the "common man/woman" image that so many US politicians adopt. I want to be impressed by a candidate. Usually I am not, so I vote for the lesser evil. Not necessarily "who will screw me over the least," but "who will screw the world over the least," which I suppose betrays my globalist bias. Attitudes towards the rest of the world matter a lot to me, perhaps more than internal policies. What can I say, I spend a lot of time out in the rest of the world, and I'm the only native-born American in my family. I care about how the US is going to play with others.
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And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran
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