A general election is a political voting election where generally all or most members of a given political body are chosen. These are usually held for a nation's primary legislative body, as distinguished from by-elections and local elections. In presidential systems, a general election is a regularly scheduled election where both the president, and either "a class" of or all members of the national legislature are elected at the same time but can also involve special elections held to fill prematurely vacated positions. A general election day may also include elections for local officials.
The term may also be used to refer to elections to any democratically elected body in which all of the members are up for election. Section 2 of the Scotland Act 1998, for example, specifically refers to ordinary elections to the Scottish Parliament as general elections. Originally, British elections took place over a period of several weeks, with individual constituencies holding polling on separate days. The Parliament Act 1911 introduced the requirement that elections in all parliamentary constituencies be held on the same day. There has been a convention since the 1930s that general elections in Britain should take place on a Thursday; the last general election to take place on any other weekday was that of 1931.
United States
In U.S. politics, general elections are elections held at any level that typically involve competition between at least two parties. General elections occur every two to six years and include the presidential election, but unlike parliamentary systems the term can also refer to special elections that fill out positions prematurely vacated by the previous office holder. Some parallels can be drawn between the general election in parliamentary systems and the biennial elections determining all House seats, although there is no analogue to "calling early elections" in the U.S., and the members of the elected U.S. Senate face elections of only one-third at a time at two-year intervals including during a general election. Unlike parliamentary systems where the term general election is distinguished from by-elections or local and regional elections, the term is used in the US in reference to and distinguished from primaries or caucuses, which are intra-party elections meant to select a party's official candidate for a particular race. Thus, if a primary is meant to elect a party's candidate for the position-in-question, a general election is meant to elect who occupies the position itself. In the State of Louisiana the expression general election means the runoff election which occurs between the two highest candidates as determined by the jungle primary.
