Are embedded congressional districts illegal?

[Sol]

No, and sometimes IMO they're a better option--it's better to put Valencia and Torrance County in a district with other suburbs of Albuquerque than split the region in three, for example.

[Sol]

From 1992 to 2002, the congressional map for Arizona had all of the Hopi reservation in AZ-03 and all of the Navajo reservation in AZ-06. The map was drawn that way because the two respective tribes did not want to be represented by the same congressman. This meant that the town of Moenkopi, Arizona, which is Hopi land and is surrounded on all four sides by Navajo land, was in AZ0-03 but was embedded within AZ-06.

Don't think that's so much of an embedded district as it is a completely noncontiguous district. Surprised that was allowed.

It isn't allowed--the Hopi reservation was linked to it by a narrow spit with no one living in it.

[Sol]

What a bizarre opinion.

What's your proposal for the Jacksonville area?

[Sol]

What's also worth discussing: keeping cities whole. I can sort of buy the argument that the extremities have more in common with a city than with each other, particularly in cases where a metro area has certain quirky geographical tendencies or strong cultural divides--i.e. splitting Atlanta is probably better than donuting Atlanta, in a hypothetical world where that's possible.

However, there are lots of cases where different suburbs are decently interconnected and similar. In that case, often times the most distinctive divide you can find is the inner city vs. the suburbs. Essentially you're arguing that this:



is worse than this:

[Sol]

I will say that on that Charlotte map it would probably be better to have the "city" district go all the way to the state border and the "suburbs" district wrap around only on the north side.

That's true, though I'm not sure exactly how that'd be really substantively different from a donut seat under Sev's critique.

IMO South Charlotte probably does belong in that 9th, though Pineville seems like a better fit with the 12th.