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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Ask Lemmy
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much less than the US supreme court, which allows for corruption and has lifetime appointments.
It's easy to think about the US supreme Court versus other high courts the same way that the US treats voting districts.
In almost every country with a similar voting system, gerrymandering, dividing up districts arbitrarily, is illegal because you can easily say well. I'm going to divide it like this so that only these people's votes count and I'll just ignore the voters that I don't like.
That is illegal in most western countries.
Gerrymandering is perfectly legal in the US, resulting in a far weaker vote because entire counties can be disregarded by dividing the county up cleverly to benefit the Republicans, who take far greater advantage of this.
Same with the court systems, the US didn't set up protections and hasn't modifed or improved the court as time has gone on and problems have arisen like direct bribery or contradicting rulings or politically refusing justice appointments.
From what I can tell, gerrymandering only works due to the whole first past the post voting system you have for districts.
In a fair system where every vote is counted all the way up the chain, ditrict shapes and sizes doesn't matter.
Getting rid of FPTP would also finally make new parties a realistic thing.
In addition, the commission who draws up the electoral districts in the US are not independent, but appointed by whichever party is ruling in a given state. John Oliver covered the topic.
I don't understand that since gerrymandering allows you to manipulate the results of the voting itself by diminishing the significance of the votes themselves.
Can you explain more how gerrymandering only works with fptp?
FPTP means that if candidate A gets a majority of the votes in a district they get to represent the district as a whole, meaning that effectively all votes for candidante B, C, D, and E are thrown away.
This means that there is a point to gerrymander districts so they will allways have the majority.
If I understand the voting system in the US correctly, votes are counted in the disctricts, districts are then counted further up.
In a fair voting system, districts does not matter for anything but statistics.
Your understanding of fptp and the US district voting system is correct, but I'm still not sure how any different voting system solves dividing districts into specific voting blocks.
I guess it would make a small but significant difference over time, but as long as gerrymandering is legal within the US framework, it's still very easy to manipulate the results by district, ranked choice voting or not.
It's s kind of like the structural problem of the electoral college. You can change the rules within the electoral college, but as long as you have those 200 people standing between the popular vote and the presidency, Donald Trump can get elected despite people not wanting him to be president.
Without FPTP, you would simply count the votes, and send the data to the election agency who will compile the final result.
There is no selecting a winner for each district and sending that on, mening there is no point to gerrymandering as it would not affect the result.
The electoral collage should also be scrapped, there is zero point to it.
Oh, for sure.
Any voting system within the current US structure won't be affected that much by switching voting formats, but illegalizing gerrymandering will make a huge difference in their current structure.
For ranked-choice voting to have a big impact, the US would have to change its whole voting system first.
Which I agree, they should.
That sort of depends on the type of electoral system. There are a couple of systems that are not fptp but do produce a winner for each district such as "open list" and "mixed member".
Gerrymandering doesn't do as much harm in those systems as it does in FPTP but can still be an issue