Atlas Redistricting Commission

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Yes

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Yes I’d love to. How do we decide who’s on the commission?

Would probably be balanced by partisanship somehow.

4 Dems, 4 Reps, 3 swing votes?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I'm willing to play as a GOP hack if needed.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Thanks for all the interest, guys! I’ll lay out more information when I get to a computer 😛 but in the meantime keep looking for Rs and indys.

So is it a given we are having a 4D-4R-3I format?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Okay, so here are my thoughts on this.

Obviously, I think it's very important that we have equal representation between Democrats and Republicans for the sake of realisticity. I personally don't see the number of independents as a huge issue, it's more padding GOP representation for obvious reasons. There's two ways we can do this -

1. Find as many GOPers as possible and use this as a guideline for the commission size. I'd like to open this to as many people as possible so if theoretically 6 Republicans joined we could have a 6-6-some number of independents commission. While it's more than there are in IRL commissions not everyone has to draw maps - folks can just vote up and down or comment on existing maps.

2. Each 'bloc' (Democrats, Republicans, Independents) has a set amount of votes divided equally among its members. For instance, if there were 10 Democrats, 5 Republicans, and 6 Independents, each bloc will get 5 votes, meaning each Democrat gets 0.5 votes, each Republican gets 1 vote, and each Independent gets 0.83 votes or something like that.

If we need to thin the pool of candidates, I can run a lottery, with the losers filling the roles of public commenters or litigators (or perhaps rotating out for different states?). Additionally, people RPing as the opposite party or an Independent could be useful but ideally that won't have to be the case.

As for other mechanics, here are my thoughts:

1) I think it would be cool to have the commission potentially set guidelines/procedures for itself after it is selected (e.g. goals like compactness, partisan balance, county splitting, etc.). This would be by majority vote. Also opens up the door for rules like a member of each party must approve a map for it to be passed or no partisan data can be considered to be passed by the commission.

2) We'd have to select states - probably no bigger than Illinois/Pennsylvania for accessibility? - and with some modicum of interesting district drawing (i.e. no Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Tennessee). Not sure if there's appetite for multiple states but I could set up a poll for that when the time comes.

3) Emphasizing that not everyone has to draw maps for this to work. Maybe every commissioner interested in bringing a map for a state can draw one, or the three factions could each come up with a map.

Anyone else have anything to add?

I prefer 1 over 2. Roleplaying sounds like fun.
Commission setting goals sounds interesting but I also suggest that once it's set it should not actually be religiously followed. I think we should loosely try to follow the model of, say, a AZ-style commission.
3 is very important to stress.
I like the thought of a lottery.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

My inclination is that we should just rotate out who does different states and pass maps for all 50 (well, excluding single-district states.) It would be such a shame to exclude NY/FL/TX/CA--that's where redistricting gets complicated enough to be interesting.

I also think the map-drawing process should--somehow--be collaborative rather than individuals bringing different maps for a simple up-down vote. Somehow, multiple ideas should be synthesized rather than seeing each map proposal as final and immutable.

Perhaps we could establish a criteria and required to make maps from there (like Michigan does with its commission). We as a body establish certain hard line criteria (no splitting X City, X many minority districts, X Urban Seats) and so on?

That sounds unworkable as an idea (even if it is presumed to be a good idea on the merits), given how what is possible varies from state to state.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I think I will switch to being a Republican member of the Commission outright.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I think we should do all states. Even California.
We don't have to do them all at once. And for the biggest states we can have a list of those who volunteer to draw proposed maps for them. Obviously that won't include everyone of course.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I think we should do all states. Even California.
We don't have to do them all at once. And for the biggest states we can have a list of those who volunteer to draw proposed maps for them. Obviously that won't include everyone of course.

We can get to those, eventually, if this still has enough steam that long. But I think it’s only sensible to start with states of manageable size.


To the point about size, I think the two commissions thing will be annoying for people in both to keep track of. Feels better to me that just a certain mark (majority? 60%?) of each of the three blocs should be required, allowing them to vary in size.

Oh, I don't disagree.
Also, I don't think I favor two commissions either.
I don't think we even need a threshold of any sort to ensure the map has majority support among all blocks. Let it simply be a matter of majority support among the commission as a whole.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I think we should do all states. Even California.
We don't have to do them all at once. And for the biggest states we can have a list of those who volunteer to draw proposed maps for them. Obviously that won't include everyone of course.

We can get to those, eventually, if this still has enough steam that long. But I think it’s only sensible to start with states of manageable size.


To the point about size, I think the two commissions thing will be annoying for people in both to keep track of. Feels better to me that just a certain mark (majority? 60%?) of each of the three blocs should be required, allowing them to vary in size.

So a majority of every bloc must consent to the plan for it to pass?

Requiring a majority of every bloc would complicate things too much. Let it be a matter of a simple majority with weighted voting along the lines you suggested.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I would prefer we have something substantatively different from past commissions. Does the support for that actually exist? Or is that just me.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I also would agree firmly with OBD's desire to keep this as something based on this forum, to keep it accessable.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I would prefer we have something substantatively different from past commissions. Does the support for that actually exist? Or is that just me.

What would this entail?

I was under the impression that a quasi-partisan hack commission* with roleplay for sure had support, and it also might be very fun doing just that.
I'm not so sure about the former anymore.
*=sort of like a forum-based equivalent of an Arizona-style or New Jersey-style commission, except with more Independents and a wider range of outcomes

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I would like to switch to being an Independent, to leave room for another actual Republican.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

[snip]

Anyway, I think we should move officially to open the commission and decide guidelines for the district-drawing to use (e.g. whether county/municipality lines are prioritized, acceptable population deviation, use of partisan data, etc.) before this gets bogged down. Also, if folks have Minnesota maps ready to propose, they could start doing so in the coming days. Maybe post a justification along with your map?

Ok, here are my ideas about guidelines. I think that we should keep them relatively "open":

Population equality
District population must not deviate from the state average by more than 1,000. For districts that consist of only whole counties a deviation of 4,000 is allowed. For districts in New England that consist of only whole towns a deviation of 2,000 is allowed.

Contiguity
Districts must be contiguous, if possible by land. If land contiguity is not possible then bridges are to be preferred over ferries and ferries over no connection at all.

VRA compliance
Maps must conform with modern interpretations of the VRA (Gingles, "performance", no over-packing, no undue cracking...).

Compactness
Districts shall be compact. To evaluate compactness not only pure geometry shall be considered, but also geographical population distribution, natural barriers and traffic connections.

Integrity of administrative divisions
Counties and cities shall not be unnecessarily split. As a rule of thumb there shall not be more county splits than districts. (For counties that have more than one district quota, you get one free split for every full quota. A three-way split counts as two splits, a four-way split counts as three splits, etc.)

Communities of interest (CoI)
shall be considered, although there are so many of them that not all of them can be respected. Examples for CoIs are:
- Metro areas
- Orientation towards the same city for services
- Commuting patterns
- Similar economic/social structure and interests
- Settlement patterns
- Media markets
- Ethnic groups (if they don't already fall under the VRA)
- Common history
- ...

Partisan fairness, competitiveness and responsiveness
are desirable goals as long as the map respects the criteria mentioned above. When evaluating partisan fairness the phenomenon of "over-proportionality" must be taken into account, i.e. an uneven split in the popular vote will usually lead to an even more lopsided seat count, a completely natural phenomenon that should not cause concern. Maps shall be responsive of political swings. Competitive districts are desirable when they arise naturally.

Historical continuity
may be cited in favor of districts that comply with the criteria mentioned above.

This is a very good framework for us to work under.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Counties are best described as a CoI in an of themselves, distinct from but also intimately related wth other CoI.
But given the vagueness of CoI as a concept, and the subjectiveness inherent in the concept, counties are the most clear and concise CoI we have.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

If this is to go ahead, I vote the same as Palandio.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Yes, I was aware of this as well and assumed people were losing interest.
I'll be happy if I'm proved wrong.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I'm still interested, but I pulled back because I felt that I was taking over a role of moderator and rule-proposer and commissioner at once and that this was not in the sense of the game. I think that we should solve the deviation issue (Progressive Moderate voted 500, 1000, 250 in a PM), but in the end I don't really care about that, and then we should begin working on MN like Senator OBD proposed and I hope that this is what people are actually interested in and that there will be more activity.

Let's hope for more activity! I agree.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

How long do I have to post an MN map?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

As I had long planned, I am going to be posting an MN map soon, now that the elections in early November are over.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

My submission.
I sought to keep municipalities and counties together, while still respecting other CoI and having compact districts. I was able to achieve a map that split zero municipalities in the entire state.
The urban seats are 4 and 5, the suburban seats are 2 and 3, and rural seats are 1, 7, and 8. 6 is a mix of suburban and rural.
https://davesredistricting.org/join/29e87896-0a99-45d6-8f48-a63aae1875e7

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

My submission.
I sought to keep municipalities and counties together, while still respecting other CoI and having compact districts. I was able to achieve a map that split zero municipalities in the entire state.
The urban seats are 4 and 5, the suburban seats are 2 and 3, and rural seats are 1, 7, and 8. 6 is a mix of suburban and rural.
https://davesredistricting.org/join/29e87896-0a99-45d6-8f48-a63aae1875e7

You might want to keep the current boundary in the north, which is designed to place different reservations in different districts along with associated off-reservation populations, apparently at the desire of the tribal authorities.

Thoughts on the most recent changes in the DRA link?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Deviation on the map is not at all large. I took the need to have smaller deviation seriously in my choices for municipalities to place in each district, and the only district that is over 1,000 from quota is the 5th (which was a massive headache of a district). Even then it's only -1,244. Which is only...-0.14% if I had to guess?
I don't think anyone else's plans were required to adhere to a such a small band of deviation, so in that context the deviations in my plan are completely justifiable.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Y'all, still interested?