California Districting

[minionofmidas]

None of the districts are politically competitive. One might think CD-3 is, but it isn't. It includes the heavily Dem Hillcrest area.

That is irrelevant.   The root cause of gerrymandering is where districting is done for the purpose of producing a particular result, whether that is ensure that most races appear competitive but aren't really, or to prevent pairing of incumbents, or to ensure that a particular racial or ethnic group can control the result by making the primary decisive.

Splendid, but totally naive. Just keep doing what you are doing, and you will have about as many competitive CD's in California as you have now.

Less than 1? I doubt that.

The rest of the text I believe.

[minionofmidas]

The thing is to have a balance - the golden mean. One metric dominating is unwise. Nice neat little maps might turn out to be a hideous gerrymander, in the sense that one party getting close to half the votes in a state with say, 10 seats, might end up with just two or something. And then there is the matter of protecting minority seats - or not.

Nice neat little maps are incapable of being a hideous gerrymander.  The purpose of electing by districts is so that the voters in a locality may choose their representative.

Broadly agreed. A map can make every bit of sense in the world from the community of interest/locality pov and still end up favoring one party because the party alignment happens to. As is the case in Britain.

But there's a difference between a map that is neat and a map that looks neat. Just for example, including Imperial and far outer SD with suburban SD doesnt really make any more sense communitywise than its current pairing via a thin corridor with Chula Vista and southern SD city, but looks better.

[minionofmidas]

text

Dude, I didn't say the current version was better. When I redistricted California, I did the same thing you did. In principle though, I'd like to see what a Desert SD/Imperial/Desert Riverside (this'd create a bottleneck, obviously)/Desert San Bernardino/however far you have to go from here, maybe including Apple Valley etc? would turn out looking like before dismissing the option.

[minionofmidas]

Yeah lumping in Santa Ana with Villa park and Anaheim hills is well, weird to say the least. But congratulations on creating an all republican OC although CD 9 would be a little interesting.

Nothing weird about putting Orange and Santa Ana in the same district.    Villa Park has about 6,000 residents and is entirely surrounded by Orange.

Personally, I think it is really weird to put San Clemente in the same district with Riverside, Costa Mesa in the same district with Palos Verdes, and Whittier in the same district with Chino and Mission Viejo.

Yeah your districts are not bad at all...if you are a republican.   Well of course there is the voting rights act thing but disregarding that good job.

Working class Hispanic turnout is so low, and Middle class Hispanics in Orange County probably lean Republican anyways, that it takes some gerrymandering to create a district that will elect a Hispanic. If you don't consider that a valid goal of redistricting, obviously you'll create a map with only Republican districts in Orange County - Santa Ana was the only city in the county to vote for John Kerry, and it did so by a handful of votes. (Sanchez' district, even as it stands, voted for Bush.)
 

[minionofmidas]

Yeah lumping in Santa Ana with Villa park and Anaheim hills is well, weird to say the least. But congratulations on creating an all republican OC although CD 9 would be a little interesting.

Nothing weird about putting Orange and Santa Ana in the same district.    Villa Park has about 6,000 residents and is entirely surrounded by Orange.

Personally, I think it is really weird to put San Clemente in the same district with Riverside, Costa Mesa in the same district with Palos Verdes, and Whittier in the same district with Chino and Mission Viejo.

Yeah your districts are not bad at all...if you are a republican.   Well of course there is the voting rights act thing but disregarding that good job.

Working class Hispanic turnout is so low, and Middle class Hispanics in Orange County probably lean Republican anyways, that it takes some gerrymandering to create a district that will elect a Hispanic. If you don't consider that a valid goal of redistricting, obviously you'll create a map with only Republican districts in Orange County - Santa Ana was the only city in the county to vote for John Kerry, and it did so by a handful of votes. (Sanchez' district, even as it stands, voted for Bush.)
 

The most Democrat town in Orange County is Laguna Beach. It was one of two towns Kerry carried in OC, the other being Laguna Woods (aka Seizure World). Bush carried Santa Ana 10,000, to Kerry's 9,000.  So says the statement of votes

You're right about Laguna Beach and Laguna Woods. The thing I remembered must have had a size threshold...
Your Santa Ana figures are weird though. According to the California SoS, Kerry won Santa Ana, and by a much larger margin than I remembered, about 29K to 24K, a lead of almost 10 points.
EDIT: Your source has the same figure (as well it should.)

[minionofmidas]

Did a rough calculation of what a sanitized version of Filner's current district could look like.
By my calculations, Imperial County, the empty parts of San Diego County (including Jamul), Imperial Beach, Chula Vista, National City, Coronado, and the parts of San Diego south of them (we'd need a bit of suburban connector territory south of state highway 54) comes to about 550,000 people. The remainder could obviously be taken from areas of San Diego right around National City. The Navy bases should also go in here, leaving a downtown SD district north of it.
That's not a good match for Imperial either, obviously, but it strikes me as a better one than lilywhite posh suburbia.

Linking Imperial with the Apple Valley via desert SB and desert Riverside also works. Include Mono and Inyo (as currently) and desert SD, and you're getting to around 620K people.

[minionofmidas]

That's because you copied the url wrong.

Here's your link again:
http://www.ocvote.com/live/e13/sov1.pdf

[minionofmidas]

Very nice. How did you do this?  By the way, you can fill in Coto de Caza a nice dark blue. 

Los Flores is 60-75 percent Bush (Just to the west of Coto, and that little white area south of Rancho Santa Margarita. Ditto, Tustin Foothills (that white area to the east of Santa Ana).

None of those are incorporated cities, but rather Census Designated Place (CDP).  So they have boundaries defined by the US Census Bureau in coordination with local officials, but they probably don't have most other data such as election data.  California may have to keep voting data for cities so that they can comply with the VRA in drawing city council districts.

AFAIK, the voting by city is on the statement of votes, but not the official election results. Some counties keep the statement of votes on their websites, but others do not.

There is a statewide statement of votes. With the city results.

[minionofmidas]

http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/sov/2004_general/ssov/pres_general_ssov_all.pdf

http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/sov/2004_general/ssov/us_senate_ssov_all.pdf

http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/sov/2004_general/ssov/ballot_measures_ssov_all.pdf

No House races.

[minionofmidas]

The ACS is still very much in testing. Phase III testing, if you will, but still testing.