2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Mississippi

[Torie]

Here is another concept.   Addendum: Now new and improved!

[Torie]

It's an attempt to game the VRA by drawing a district that minimizes white Dems, maximizes black Pubs and/or black non voters. The very "best" precincts are those with prisons. The evil scheme is out there on the public square. Of course, if it goes to SCOTUS, the BCVAP number should remove those ineligible to vote because they are behind bars. Mississippi and that one CD, is where there is some potential to play this game, to my knowledge.

And this map has "perfect" population equality, because now for some states (of which Mississippi is one), the DRA allows one to hit a precinct, and then zoom in to cull the census blocks. Sometimes it takes some work, because most of the population in a precinct is in one or two census blocks.  I believe the census protocol, is that within a census block, you estimate the population  split based on the relative number of housing units on each side of the line. Where the line bisects a house, you look to where the kitchen is. If it bisects a nursing home, you ask for a floor plan of the bedrooms. That hypo as to both actually occurred in Hudson, since I drew a map which bifurcated a couple of census blocks, and the old map bisected the Fireman's Home, but nobody knew that but me, because it's Hudson. I seem to get around, don't I?

[Torie]

It's an attempt to game the VRA by drawing a district that minimizes white Dems, maximizes black Pubs and/or black non voters. The very "best" precincts are those with prisons. The evil scheme is out there on the public square. Of course, if it goes to SCOTUS, the BCVAP number should remove those ineligible to vote because they are behind bars. Mississippi and that one CD, is where there is some potential to play this game, to my knowledge.

And this map has "perfect" population equality, because now for some states (of which Mississippi is one), the DRA allows one to hit a precinct, and then zoom in to cull the census blocks. Sometimes it takes some work, because most of the population in a precinct is in one or two census blocks.  I believe the census protocol, is that within a census block, you estimate the population  split based on the relative number of housing units on each side of the line. Where the line bisects a house, you look to where the kitchen is. If it bisects a nursing home, you ask for a floor plan of the bedrooms. That hypo as to both actually occurred in Hudson, since I drew a map which bifurcated a couple of census blocks, and the old map bisected the Fireman's Home, but nobody knew that but me, because it's Hudson. I seem to get around, don't I?

Why would the BCVAP figure reveal anything of import if black prisoners are still citizens?

Prisoners can't vote. So they count towards getting to 50% BCVAP if black, but they don't vote. One could write a program (or just do a data sort of the precinct data on a spread sheet and map it) to find in descending order the ratio of BVCAP's to Dem percentage in each precinct, put those precincts on a map and use the "best" one's within reach, and also map the precincts that have the lowest ratio of non black voters (almost all white in MS) to Republican votes, and map those precincts as ones to avoid where possible. You might also tag a set of precincts that are at least say 50% BCVAP that have the highest ratio of black BCVAP to total population to ferret out the low turnout black precincts. The issue is just how much of that the court's will tolerate.

Playing the  prison pawn is probably one that the courts will not tolerate, but who knows?
I remember a precinct in Madison County, Ohio that had like 5,000 people and about 400 votes or something (I see it is still there, with still a huge ratio discrepancy (Marysville 10) . It has a prison in it.  

One thing that is reasonably safe to assume is that if you play this game you had better be right at 50% BCVAP, or very, very close to it, and can defend that percentage (it is a mere estimate), where the gerrymander like the map above had lines that were clearly drawn using the "program" as described above. Such a map is obviously being drawn to take out a black Democrat where the voting in many areas seems to be around 95% racially polarized. In some areas it is less polarized, sometimes favoring the Pubs, and sometimes  the Dems, vis a vis the racial percentages. Where it favors the Dems (more white Democrats as a percentage of the pie), those are often the worst precincts of all.

[Torie]

Surely such a district would be litigated out of existence since it's drawn to prevent the black population from being able to elect the candidate of their choice, right?

Not if 50% BCVAP is a safe harbor. This hypothetical puts stress on that concept obviously.

[Torie]

And here is a very reasonable looking map, that gets quite close to the same thing. Interesting: the whole exercise was all sound and fury signifying not much. So now the issue is whether the Pubs will put MS-02 in play, particularly if and when the incumbent Thompson retires.

[Torie]

I managed a modest improvement on my prior map:



MS-02's Black VAP increases a hair to 61.4%, and now only a single county (Lowndes) is split.

That is THE map. We don't like erosity from this particular quarter. Kudos.

[Torie]

I managed a modest improvement on my prior map:



MS-02's Black VAP increases a hair to 61.4%, and now only a single county (Lowndes) is split.

That is THE map. We don't like erosity from this particular quarter. Kudos.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/cbcc96d5-6af5-414c-bbeb-8cf67e8f3b31
How does this compare?

That is OK from an erosity standpoint.