Federal judge instructed state to use older maps, with Republicans likely to appeal decision
New maps that added five Republican districts in Texas hit a legal roadblock on Tuesday, with a federal judge saying the state cannot use the 2025 maps because they are probably “racially gerrymandered”.
The decision is likely to be appealed, given the push for more Republican-friendly congressional maps nationwide and Donald Trump’s full-court press on his party to make them. Some states have followed suit, and some Democratic states have retaliated, pushing to add more blue seats to counteract Republicans.
A panel of three federal judges in Texas said in a decision that the state must use previously approved 2021 maps for next year’s midterms rather than the ones that kickstarted a wave of mid-decade redistricting. The plaintiffs, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, are “likely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map”, so the court approved a preliminary injunction to stop the map’s use for next year’s elections.
your interpretation of FPTP is mostly correct however it’s a plurality that wins, even if it’s not 50%: if there are 3 candidates, you’d only the highest vote total out of all the candidates to win (which could be as low as 34%)
what you’re talking about though is representative vs proportional systems… in representative systems a group of people directly elects their representative (like in geographic districts, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be geographic: this can be seen in some cases where minorities are codified and those groups elect a minority representative), where in proportional systems your vote goes towards the government as a whole
i think this is far less of a black and white good vs bad than fptp vs stv/rcv/irv:
fptp voting counting leads to huge issues which force a 2 party system that will never represent the majority of people (through things like defensive voting, people vote less for the candidate they want and more for the candidate they think is most likely to win who isn’t the candidate they most don’t want), and recent american politics has shown that fptp also leads to much more polarising politics (in RCV systems candidates care about their 2nd, 3rd, 4th choice votes so they have to be as likeable as possible: they don’t want to come off as bullying they 3rd place candidate, because their voters really do matter)
proportional vs representative is more nuanced though… with representative systems you have someone who is there to represent your group specifically, rather a kind of often nebulous set of ideals… proportional meanwhile you do get more philosophically aligned candidates, but they always have to form coalitions with other parties (nobody has a majority: proportional governments are formed by lots of small parties/candidates) which means you can never really hold them to what they say: they’ll have to compromise a lot, and the government is very much sometimes beholden to the whims of marginal groups who hold the power (this has been happening a lot in europe at the moment where coalitions break down)
so in australia’s case we have a bit of a combination: for our house of representatives we use IRV/representative… we have districts, and we elect a representative, and those representatives form a government and the leader of the majority party is the prime minister. we also have our senate which is proportional (but still IRV), so they have a lot more small parties - including some far right shitbags
note though i am using RCV, STV, and IRV interchangeably but i believe they are different forms of RCV (and yes, i also believe RCV is both the category and a specific implementation). i think our ballot counting is IRV, but that’s based on some high school civics stuff so it may actually be another method and the teacher just said something generic