I was wondering how did the electoral system work in the HRE? I was reading Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, and I found the idea of a state becoming an electorate a bit confusing. If I understood how the book explained it correctly, basically, when a certain country wins enough prestige with the HRE (through favors to the empreror or some other means), they are rewarded with being an electorate. Then, when there is an election for the new emperor in the HRE, a deal is brokered between the electorates and the Hapsburg family, and countries are able to gain more money or land in exchange for their vote.
Am I understanding that correctly? I don't really understand the point of the electoral system if it's agreed upon beforehand how the votes will be decided. Was this presented as a democracy to the public? Or were the backroom deals common knowledge?
There was no illusion in Early Modern times that the nominally elective monarchy of the Holy Roman Empire represented anything resembling what we today call "democracy".
The system makes more sense when you consider the context of it's origin and development. The position of Holy Roman Emperor really did function as a proper elective monarchy before the election of 1486. That's when the Hapsuburgs started to make it into a "hereditary position". A better way to understand it was that it wasn't exactly hereditary, but the Hapsburg dynasty was so much more powerful than any other noble house by the early 1600s, that there was no one who could realistically hold the position, given the politics of the time.
However, the act of holding the election wasn't really about "choosing" a new Emperor, as much as it was about the major noble houses publically declaring their support for the new emperor, which enhanced the emperor's political legitimary and ideologically confirmed his claims to power. Another aspect of this is that in some ways, by agreeing to publically acknowledge the overlordship of the HRE, the smaller polities (dukedoms, margraviatages, prince-cardinals, etc) prevented the government of the Emperor from having a political excuse to turn the HRE into a more centralized kind of state, like Spain or France. Realize that Poland next door also had an elective monarchy that was reasonably functional through the late middle ages and only became decentralized and dysfunctional in the late 1500s and 1600s.
Does that explain it at all? The take-home here is that the point of the electoral system isn't really about "choosing" who to vote for, but rather about the major noble houses reaching a political accommodation with the emperor that gave the noble houses the local autonomy they wanted, but gave the emperor the money and troops he needed. It was about regional and national elites coming to a political arrangement that everyone could live with, and there was no element of popular participation as we currently understand the concept of "elections".