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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