Forum policy on redistricting discussion

[Brittain33]

As the 2021-2022 redistricting round approaches, it's inevitable that conversations about House, legislative, and gubernatorial elections will touch on redistricting and speculation about what a district will look like in the future or what impact an election result will have on districts.

People (myself included) enjoy linking to maps online or trying different ideas with tools like DRA and Moon Duchin's app. However, it's easy for maps to dominate a thread as people debate each other's maps and put up their own which is what the Geography forum is for.

To balance the need to discuss redistricting's impact on elections without becoming a duplicate redistricting forum, let's try these guidelines:

These posts fit the forum and will not be moved or moderated on their own:

• Posts talking about redistricting and the future of a district as they relate to an upcoming election
• Maps of the existing district and its past performance (e.g., Miles's maps from twitter)

These posts belong to the Geography forum:

• Individually created maps and speculative maps
• Comments on someone's speculative maps

Let's give this a go and see how it works.

[Oryxslayer]

A previous post concerning this issue:

If anything, the recent direction of these threads should tell the mods that soon it is time to create the 40ish individual state Redistricting threads in geography and demographics, like what occurred in 2010. I would wait until after the handful of 2019 elections in November, so every state is on the same page: the census is coming and 2020 is your last time to change course.

[muon2]

My reply to Oryxslayer is appropriate here.

If anything, the recent direction of these threads should tell the mods that soon it is time to create the 40ish individual state Redistricting threads in geography and demographics, like what occurred in 2010. I would wait until after the handful of 2019 elections in November, so every state is on the same page: the census is coming and 2020 is your last time to change course.

10 years ago the state redistricting pages were started organically by users. All I did was create a file with links and merge duplicate threads for states. I was planning to replace the link thread as a critical mass of state threads appeared.

[SuperCow]

Here's a suggested constitutional amendment. County boundaries have been set for a hundred years or more and the boundaries are purely geographical and not political. Based on this premise, gerrymandering can be curtailed immensely (while still giving limited flexibility) by an amendment on redistricting. Not something like an independent committee. They don't work, because they are not truly independent.

But math is independent. Make it so no federal district can exist partially in more than counties, and all districts must be contiguous.

How would this work? About 800K people will make up a district in the next census. Assume the 5 districts below are only bordering the county on each side of it.

County A has 520K people
County B has 300K people
County C has 220K people
County D has 250K people
County E has 650K people
(A million or so in the rest of the state. Doesn't matter)

A district would be impossible to snake into all 5 districts. One district could be in A, B, & C as long as one of the 3 counties was completely part of the district. (partial A, full B, partial C) Nobody from B could be removed unless you enough from A or C to fill up the other. If you remove enough people from A in your district to fill up C completely, only then can you start adding people from D into the district.

Put it another way, say the counties are arranged:

A B C
D E F
G H I

So you start adding precincts from A & B. You can't add any precincts from C, D or E unless all of the precincts in either A or B are completely used.

No changes to state representative districts. That's their business. This only applies to people who serve the federal government.