Utah 2020 Redistricting

[Hope For A New Era]

Districts are tricky in Utah because of how intensely the population is concentrated in one area.  Over 80% of the population lives in the narrow corridor from Brigham City to Santaquin. So almost any map will look gerrymandered, even if it's not.

Here's a "future Dem gerrymander" I came up with, just because I was curious how easily it could be done. It has two Titanium R districts and two extremely competitive districts that are expected to shift dramatically to the left in the future.



https://davesredistricting.org/join/a966feba-97f9-4970-8490-f867eb518418

[Hope For A New Era]

Here's an extremely neat and precise D sink map.

It consists of 3 Titanium R districts and one (probably) Safe D district.

It cuts no counties except Salt Lake County.

Within Salt Lake County, there are only two municipality cuts:
- Magna is split along a major road that runs straight north/south through the entirety of the city (8000 West).
- There are a few precincts that don't respect city boundaries along the border between Sandy and Cottonwood Heights, causing the district border to zigzag a bit. I've made it as close to the city limits as possible.

All districts are fully contiguous both by boundary and by road (though the SLC and non-SLC portions of 2 are connected by only a single road).

All districts have deviations of less than 5,000. In fact, 3 and 4 have deviations of less than 1,000.

There is a slight COI miss, adding Morgan County to the D sink district...but, well, do you want a no-county-splits map or not?

link


Side note, there's got to be a better way to do this. Is there any way to add a "bulk fill" option to DRA, so you can highlight an area and have all precincts there made part of a district? Salt Lake County is extremely tedious.

[Hope For A New Era]

This isn't a bad map at all--the one thing is that the 1st is underpopulated while the 2nd is overpopulated--IMO you ought to clip Davis and then do a little fiddling in SLC, since Tooele and Box Elder aren't connected in practice.

You can press control and then use your mouse, and it'll create a rectangle which you can color.

Found a better solution: Rich County 1 -> 4, one precinct in Magna 4 -> 2.

I don't love splitting Southern Utah and pairing South Salt Lake County with anything but Utah County just to avoid further county chops. It's so easy to fit three districts compactly in the Wasatch Front that I have a hard time justifying any other choice.

I like avoiding county splits as much as possible because people almost always know which county they live in. They may not know exactly where in the county they live (and there are also situations where people might think they live in a specific city but live just outside the city limits, etc).

Minimizing jurisdiction-splits of all kinds is helpful to the voter.

[Hope For A New Era]

Here's a silly one, just for fun. If you assume that McMullin voters break evenly (which seems to have been approximately the case) and maintain those voting patterns into the future, you can draw two Tilt D districts and two Titanium R districts.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/c9b1e599-7ee1-4a98-b075-8e8d986ee00b

[Hope For A New Era]

I attempted to draw a fair state senate map.

The problem is that Utah Democrats pack themselves so hard that if you try to draw a map with fair partisanship (roughly 18R-11D, so like 14R 7D and 8 swing districts, or something), you have to completely ignore the concept of COI and draw like 5 shoestring districts stretching from central SLC out into the Jordans and then cram the competitive districts into the east side of GSLV (plus one competitive district centered in Ogden).

[Hope For A New Era]

There is a road connection, it looks like it's a small road, but it is there.   There's certainly a much better connection from Morgan to Rich than from Cache to Rich!   Again - Rich County is just in general a very isolated, remote area...there is no ideal place to connect it to.

What? There's a connection from Cache to Rich. It's a very nice road, actually. I've driven it.

It appears that there are dirt roads connecting Morgan and Rich.

At some point I'm going to have to attempt both the Tooele-Box Elder drive and the Morgan-Rich drive.