Iowa Consolidation to 4 Districts

[muon2]

If the Area XV counties really wanted to avoid Cedar Rapids, they would do better to follow SWIPCO and join SIMPCO. Politically that would make more sense than joining with Davenport. By linking to the west XV could force Davenport to go with Cedar Rapids so they don't have to.

[muon2]

If the public is involved in the counties' choices, then the southern two tiers of counties are not going to want to be in with the band from Des Moines to Iowa City to Davenport. They are much more like MO to the south and would probably see nothing wrong with a largely rural CD that included three corners of the state.

[muon2]

The balancing step is the real question here. It seems to move away from the county-oriented preferences that drove the plan up to that point. It would be interesting to compare this plan with one produced under the current constraints. Would they be substantially different?

[muon2]

Here's an example of why I posed the question in my previous post. Let me start with the result of the map after all mergers and before swaps.



I started by making a swap between the central and west district to get the central district to 1.000 of the quota. Then I made a swap between the northeast and southeast districts to put the se district at 1.001 of the quota. Finally I swapped between the west and northeast districts to get them at 1.000 and 0.999 of quota respectively. It starts from the same baseline, uses a comparable method of swaps, and gets to less population inequality. What would prevent a court from finding that this plan is practicably better?

[muon2]

This seems more rational, but I would quibble with some of the steps. Particularly important is the first pick by northeast. Clinton is part of the Quad Cities CSA and they aren't likely to go there after taking Dubuque. Cedar is shared by the Quad Cities, Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, with the last being the least impactful. The I80 corridor would probably cause northeast to leave it in the south. So instead after Dubuque I would expect northeast to pick Cerro Gordo since Mason City ties in well to the northeast (my family is originally from NE IA).

There is also the question of where Central should pick in the first round. Either they should pick second if the four regions are ranked by deviation before the round, or they should go third as the region with the largest deviation.yet to pick.

[muon2]

I like to go by a rule of thumb that deviations over 1000 are unacceptable.  This map fails to accomplish such.

A rule of thumb is nice, but the question should be - are such large deviations justified by other considerations? Demonstrably an IA plan should be able to get deviations under 100 without any county chops. Since counties are whole, the consideration must come from other factors (eg. intact metro areas, erosity). Once those factors are identified, then one asks if those other factors can be met with a lower deviation.

[muon2]

I like to go by a rule of thumb that deviations over 1000 are unacceptable.  This map fails to accomplish such.

Are these bubbles not equal in size?



You are looking at from this perspective.



Imagine you were judging persons who were 6-foot tall. Since you wanted to be scientific, 1.829 m.

One of the candidates was 1.831 m, another 1..828 m. You would say that the first was twice as much taller than the ideal as the second was shorter.

A person with any common sense would say they were the same height.

But that would be a reasonable standard. For congressional districts we both know the court requires a practicable standard. A reasonable plan only survives if there is no other way to meet well-described criteria used to create it, for example shifting the fewest number of residents as WV did.

[muon2]

I think that there should be a quota enshrined into law. Countries around the world use quotas of between 5% and 10%, however I think that a quota for US congressional districts should be either 1% or 2.5%. A quota would be a great improvement, and would vastly reduce ambiguity.

States in the US have the latitude to set quotas in the range you suggest for their legislative and other local districts. However, SCOTUS set a much more restrictive standard for congressional districts. The standard is so restrictive that lawyers advising states during redistricting opined that the districts needed to be exactly equal in population. SCOTUS clarified their ruling earlier this decade in the WV case. Now the lawyers say you need exact equality, unless you can show that the deviation is the only way to achieve the state goals. Even then it's not clear that a range in excess of 1% (deviation of 0.5%) would hold up.

[muon2]

I think that there should be a quota enshrined into law. Countries around the world use quotas of between 5% and 10%, however I think that a quota for US congressional districts should be either 1% or 2.5%. A quota would be a great improvement, and would vastly reduce ambiguity.

States in the US have the latitude to set quotas in the range you suggest for their legislative and other local districts. However, SCOTUS set a much more restrictive standard for congressional districts. The standard is so restrictive that lawyers advising states during redistricting opined that the districts needed to be exactly equal in population. SCOTUS clarified their ruling earlier this decade in the WV case. Now the lawyers say you need exact equality, unless you can show that the deviation is the only way to achieve the state goals. Even then it's not clear that a range in excess of 1% (deviation of 0.5%) would hold up.

What I mean is that, although such a quota wouldn't hold up at current, it should be enshrined into law for future, because at current there is no definitive standard, just a highly ambiguous requirement of (if memory serves me,) "approximately equal in population"

The issue is that SCOTUS made a constitutional determination. Generally Congress can't overturn that without a constitutional amendment. However, the constitution does give Congress some power with respect to its own elections. I believe that if Congress created a national congressional redistricting commission, and gave it clear criteria for districts, they could put a maximum range between the largest and smallest district of 1%. That would allow the commission to have districts with modest inequality as long as they could show that it was the best way to meet the given criteria. But if someone could show that the criteria could be met with lower deviation, they would have to go with that plan instead.

[muon2]

That is a great summary Jim. I hope you don't mind if I quote you on it when I write or talk on the subject.

[muon2]

I have a novice question for JimTrex or anyone willing to answer. If another state was to take up Iowa's method, but a single county had significantly more population that a single Congressional district -- let's say Illinois' Cook County for simplicity's sake -- what would happen?

It would be declared unconstitutional.  Only states that have enough counties that none are that large are allowed to use this method.

The IA constitution requires whole counties, but the IA code requires the legislature to justify variances in excess of 1%. This is similar to hat happened in the OH Senate in 2011, where the legislature had to choose between conflicting laws. I assume they would divide the large county with as few chops as possible.

[muon2]

Could you explain in a little more detail the workings of "flow proportional to the difference"?

[muon2]

Initially the populations were

C 1.135, NE 1.061, W 0.998, SE 0.806

Between two adjacent districts, A and B, with populations P_A and P_B, the flow F_AB is (P_A - P_B)/D

For the first round I used a divisor of 10, so the flow from C to SE was (1.135 - 0.806)/10 = 0.016. Flows between other adjacent districts were calculated in a similar fashion, and the populations were updated,

C 1.108, NE 1.049, W 0.999, SE 0.844

And the process repeated with a divisor of 9.

There may be physical analogues (current flow between capacitors? fluid flow between tanks?).

I suppose that a constant divisor could be used, but then convergence to equilibrium would take infinitely long.

The constant in electrical or fluid flow depends on the size of the pipe. If you want to consider physical flow as a model the formula might be F = k E (delta P), where k is a constant for all rounds, E is proportional to the boundary length or erosity between the two districts, and delta P is the population difference. k should be large enough that overshoots should be possible, since oscillations can happen in underdamped systems. Erosity could also be applied to the relative county population, so that the counties most contributing to erosity are most likely to move.