Atlas Redistricting Commission

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

When are we going to start the redistricting process?

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

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 hope we don't do Ohio due to how much of a damn nightmare Franklin County is for map making.

Some medium sized states that I suggest we could chose are AZ, GA, MN, NC or WI.

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

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.

Yeah, I agree with Phil.

A lot of cities have utterly horrible city lines and that can cause districts to be non contiguous. You have no choice to split some cities up or your above the 0.75% pop threshold. I like how New England organize their cities.

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

Here's my attempt at making a GA map that tries to split as few cities as possible.

There's 7R seats, 6D seats and one rapidly Dem trending battleground suburban seat that is tilt R.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/65db418d-d097-429c-964c-78b2713522e0

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

Well, the thing is that in an 8-seat map the Twin Cities metro is worth about 4.5 seats, so you are always going to have at least one seat that stretches out of the metro. I could have moved my SE district slightly closer to the metro, still stopping "at the gates", which would have moved the district from an R+7.5 PVI to an R+6.2 PVI. Maybe I should do that.

In leecannon's map the "4.5th district" is in the SE. The other districts in the metro are quite ok, although putting Fridley with Minneapolis and Columbia Heights not seems a bit strange and I personally would rather split a city, but that's a matter of taste. The SE district lacks cohesion and I think that for a district artificially created to achieve partisan balance it goes too far. I also think that the non-metro districts would have benefitted from a more compact north-middle-south split.

ProgressiveModerate's proposal pretends that 4 seats are enough for the metro. As a result his SE district basically goes to the gates of the metro with some strange lines in Hastings and Farmington and cutting into the suburbs/exurbs in Chanhassen/Chaska. The two arms to Mankato and Chanhassen are in my opinion only justifiable by partisan criteria. The rest of the map is nice.

S019's map is nice outside of the metro. Inside the metro the distribution of suburbs between the districts feels random. I also seriously doubt the necessity of a specifically drawn minority access seat in a place where Ilhan Omar was elected twice.

The map made by Progressive Moderate's friend (a map with 5 R-leaning seats in a state that leans marginally D and where most maps drawn purely on geographic criteria yield 4 R-leaning seats) is obviously not something a commission like ours should seriously consider.

@ Thunder98: Nice map. I'm just not sure if posting maps for states you like whenever you like is the way to go. It could result in chaos. I posted a map for MN because that was the first state that OBD proposed earlier in the thread. It would be nice though if we arrived at GA soon.

Oops I forgot that we were doing MN first, my bad.  

Anyways here's my MN map. Not a single city/town are split.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/1c6bc84f-fc1b-4318-8dc3-eb2e73ce46be

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

I’m still in

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

Dropping out of this commission. I kind of got bored of redistricting.