I’m trying to wrap my brain around what’s happening in Missouri. There are different judges with different directives. Politicians that say they’re just going to do whatever they want to win. The federal, supreme court not getting involved. The Governor slow-rolling changes in the hopes of delaying any legal way of preventing the redistricting, etc…
Do States, or even on a federal level, have an equivalent to our “Elections Canada”? Namely, a non-partisan body that controls and manages elections and is not answerable to the government or to any particular party.
Basically, once an election is called, the prime minister and every other member of parliament is essentially just another candidate. The functioning and planning of the election is entirely in the hands of a non-partisan entity.
Does this exist in the U.S. and in the current climate politicians are just flat-out ignoring it? Or is it not a thing down there?
It’s not really a thing, though some states have non-partisan redistricting commissions.
In the US, elections are constitutionally run by the state, not the federal government. Functionally the Secretary of State for each state runs the elections, which are really run by county election boards.
Keep in mind that in the US elections happen on predetermined cycles, they are not typically “called” like in a parliamentary system. Every representative, senator, governor, and president knows when their term is up, when elections happen, and what the state timlines are for each one.
In MO, my understanding is that the USSC simply remanded the ruling back to the MI Surpreme Court who had already ruled the new map can’t be used. The issue really stems from that new map having been used in primaries to determine the candidates, so who appears on a ballot in a location whose district has changed between then and now?
non-partisan body that controls and manages elections and is not answerable to the government or to any particular party
No that isn’t really a thing here. On a state by state basis, sometimes districting is set by a non-partisan board, but there is nothing federal. Our constitution states that each state basically is responsible for its own elections.
If it did exist, it would ultimately be controlled by either the executive branch or legislative branch and could not be made incorruptible by partisan meddling.
Technically I don’t think anything could be perfectly protected from corruption sadly. Elections Canada is funded by Parliament, NOT by the party currently in power at the time. But theoretically if the party in power has a majority, they could do whatever they wanted, like cutting Elections Canada’s funding by majority vote. But the absolute shit-show that would result would be insane.
The American system confuses the hell out of me.
Americans don’t really do the whole “Arms Length, non-partisan agency” thing very well. I mean they used to do better before the recent SCOTUS rulings that effectively mandated active executive control, but even before that, about the only thing that was truly non-partisan was the US Postal Service (USPS) and both parties have been doing everything in their power to eliminate that short of a constitutional amendment.
Also, their electoral systems are just an absolute mess of wildly different systems in every state. The idea of a standardized electoral process, let alone an autonomous non-partisan oversight body to oversee and coordinate it is an alien concept to them. We get all kinds of people complaining that a proportional representation system would be too complicated for people to understand, but they’ve effectively got 50(+, sort of) electoral systems with an absolute labyrinth of contradictory rules, obstacles, and objectives. You need a Ph.D in Statistics and a supercomputer to model it properly.
