Questions for redistricting enthusiasts

[the artist formerly known as catmusic]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I figured here was as good as anywhere.

I've been doing a lot of redistricting stuff on Dave's Redistricting recently for fun - just kind of nerdy, hyper-focus stuff because the math is fun lol. But I kind of want to "get better" at making districts now. I feel like mine always end up janky and I give up by the end of the state, ending up splitting cities and counties all over the place. I feel like I'm trying to get good minority representation/proportionality but then I get mediocre ratings from the analyze tool.

What do you guys look at to get good districts, things other than what's provided on Dave's website? What metrics are you considering? What can I do to make better, fairer, and more representational districts?

I have this project I've dabbled in where I make districts that are approx. 225k per district to get a more representational view of the country, and I'd like to make up the whole country. I want to know what that would look like, and I really believe it could be insightful for people to look at. I just want to be sure I do it right!

Any advice/helpful comments/words of wisdom appreciated. Thanks so much you guys!

[kwabbit]

When drawing a large or complex state, don't go from end to the other. Try drawing a bit of one area, then a bit of another area, such that you don't end with one part of the state being janky at the end. It all has to fit well together at the end, sometimes one part of the state being perfect means another part is terribly botched. This is essential in Florida, California, and Texas.

[It’s so Joever]

The truth is…all districts are “janky” in some way. Redistricting really is just a game of trade offs, you will never have a truly good district (unless it’s an at large )
You can do your best to minimize downsides and others will give tips, but geography gets the final word.

Generally the racial maps aren’t a bad start for building communities, but you can find lots of other detailed maps online, life expecntacny, income, education level maps as well. Really a lot of it is practice. The more you keep going to more familiar you will be with everywhere.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I tend to look at counties as units. And compactness. But then I've liked things neater and compacter since basically forever.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

If there's a specific sort of district I want to draw, like a vote sink or a majority minority one, I draw it first, and then draw the surrounding districts around it. Also helps to use counties or cities as some sort of base block and try to avoid splitting them whenever possible.

[muon2]

The problem is that there are way too many geographic units to cleanly divide a state, unless a partisan gerrymander is your goal. Census blocks are adored by gerrymanderers because they allow maximum manipulation in the name of population equality. Even block groups and precincts are too numerous for congressional districts.

Last decade we did a simple study using counties and towns that I turned into a graph. The vertical axis is a log scale where 0 is a maximum range of 1 person (ie exact equality), 1 is a maximum range of 10, 2 is a maximum range of 100, and 3 is a maximum range of 1000 persons. Ranges that large have been permitted by SCOTUS when a state strictly follows neutral redistricting principles.

You can use the graph to determine how equal you want the districts to be, then find the average number of geographic units on the horizontal axis. For example if you want 4 districts to be within 100 persons of each other you should plan on having 4*24 = 96 units (hello Iowa). The muon rules started with this and then built in more sophisticated measures so that if the number of counties is too small, one can keep the chopped counties at a minimum and make reasonable tradeoffs for compactness.

[the artist formerly known as catmusic]

Thank you all so much for your help/words of advice with this! I really appreciate it Definitely want to get more into this project.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

For me I have a mental checklist of things I try and stick by in order of presidency

1) minority representation

2) Road/Transit continuity, especially in mountain states

3) minimize county/city spilts

4) Try and preserve regional distinctions/COI, basically trying not to put disconnected communities together


There’s others but those are the big things I can think of rn