Constituency boundaries need to be redrawn from time to time, but they can no longer be fiddled within the Republic of Ireland by the political parties in power. In 1974, half a century ago, the Fine Gael/Labour government enacted a gerrymandering revision of boundaries designed to tilt the odds in their favour at the next election. The wheeze was to have lots of three-seat constituencies, where their Fianna Fáil opponents were judged to be weak, especially in the Dublin area. If your first preference vote is 40% or lower, you will struggle to get more than one seat out of three.

The calculation inspiring the wheeze was that Fine Gael and Labour might pick up one each, giving them a disproportionate bonus of seats over their share of the vote, less likely to happen in constituencies allocated four or five seats. For various reasons the government lost popularity, Fianna Fáil did notably well in the capital in 1977 and swept back to power, winning two out of three, where the political engineers had designed the electoral map to give them just one.

Too clever by half. The eventual result was a reformed Irish system, where boundaries are drawn by an independent commission, not by the politicians in power. Not so in the US, where the politicians controlling the legislature in each of the 50 states get to do the job, state by state – only a few have set up independent panels as Ireland has done. Three important states, two red (Republican) and one blue (Democrat) are embroiled in redistricting controversies. They are Texas, California and Ohio.

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The red state of Texas was the prime mover followed by blue California, where politicians denounced the Texas move and then reciprocated with a proposal to fiddle their own boundaries, eliciting a tit-for-tat response from Ohio, another red state. There may be many more attempts at redistricting. The three states already involved have boundaries generous to the majority party.

Trump lost heavily in California but the Republican party was entitled, without gerrymandering, to expect far more seats in the house of representatives than they won. In both Texas and Ohio, the Republican bonus of seats over their voter support was well beyond what they would have enjoyed in a fairer system.

In all three cases, the fiddle is not enough for the dominant party and is to be extended. Any such local redrawing of boundaries in Ireland simply cannot happen, thanks to the impartial Electoral Commission.

There are two further wrinkles to the US system of selecting members of the federal legislature. Each state gets to have two senators and the US senate is far more powerful than its Irish namesake. Under the constitution, each state gets to have precisely two senators, regardless of population or numbers entitled to vote. If both Donegal and Dublin were allocated two TDs, the arrangement would be declared unconstitutional by the courts – there can only be a small imbalance, around 5% in seats relative to population.

Something equally strange applies to the allocation of seats for the house of representatives – the extremes are California with 52 and tiny states which must be allocated the minimum of two. The smallest is Wyoming, which gets one member for every 300,000 people while California gets one for about 20m.

The US constitution is the ultimate source of these anomalies. Written in 1787, it treated the 13 breakaway states in the east of the country as having equal voice. It is now virtually impossible to amend the constitution since small states acting together can block any change – three quarters of the 50 must agree.

This means that just 12 of the states can withhold consent – 38 must ratify, plus two-thirds in both houses of congress. For practical purposes, the constitution cannot be amended, unlike the position in almost all European countries where public referendum or a parliamentary vote is enough.

In the US, it is not difficult to find 12 red states to block any constitutional change which would deprive them of seats in the legislature, and the influence which goes with it, beyond what their population or voter numbers would justify. Nor do they doubt the Democrats would do the same if the chips fell their way.

America’s self-image sees the country as the Land of the Free and the great defender of democratic values, a model to be envied. Its storied founding fathers saddled it, over two centuries ago, with a blatantly undemocratic and unamendable basic law.