Iowa-style Redistricting

[traininthedistance]

Nebraska:



District 1: Deviation -240; 44.6% Obama.
District 2: Deviation 59; 48.6% Obama.
District 3: Deviation 182; 28.0% Obama.

Aesthetically, I'd prefer a District 2 which takes in most of Sarpy instead of going north; it would do a better job of keeping the Omaha MSA together than this plan does.

[traininthedistance]

If you loosen the requirements just a tiny bit- up the deviation, split counties which are larger than a CD- then you can almost do this with Indiana:



1: -3498
2: -361
3: 2185
4: -719
5: 2176
6: 1097
7: 992
8: -50
9: -1818

It may be possible to lower the deviation on CD 1 if you're willing to get really ugly, and sacrifice that beautiful CD 8.  Really, the whole map looks freakishly clean, save the jigsaw boundary between 4 and 5.

[traininthedistance]

Maine is technically possible, just squeaking in under the 1% threshold:



Deviations 5889 and 5890.

Obviously in New England it makes more sense to do things by town line than county line; counties aren't that important and you can be much more precise.  Maine is the only New England state where this is even theoretically possible, though.

I'd argue that keeping whole municipalities together at the expense of a couple more county splits is also the right policy in PA, NY, and NJ.  Counties do still have some power here in the Mid-Atlantic, but these three states have no unincorporated areas, or even any survey townships; municipalities hold most of the power.  And many of the counties are large enough that frequent splitting is unavoidable anyway.

...

Tried South Carolina, pretty sure it's impossible mainly due to Greenville and Spartanburg.

[traininthedistance]

From this one can also estimate how many counties one should need to expect whole county redistricting to have a range of less than 1%. That limit is about 8.3 counties per district. With fewer counties, the model would predict a range in excess of 7000 or about 1% of an ideal district. The above ME example is a case in point, since it has only 8 counties per CD and has a range just over 1%.

Doh, I was thinking "range" was just the highest deviation for some reason.  That'll teach me to read better.