For the purposes of districting, islands are typically defined as contiguous when connected by a land bridge.
Wouldn’t cover the islands in my county in the slightest. We’d need 23 districts more.
Come to think of it, if there is a “land” bridge, that wouldn’t be an island, would it?
Bridge to land. Not land bridge. :smack:
Dang. I was doing really well until Mission 5. How the hell am I supposed to get it pass the districting board if they won’t even show me party affiliation or other information I need to appease them? I took Pat’s house of of her district but it wouldn’t even tell me where the hell she lived.
Or is that kind of the point?
I was thinking more like putting a regular grid down over the state, and then have a simple algorithm that distorted the grid until the population in each cell was equal. You don’t need to know political affiliation or race or religion or economic conditions or anything else about the people to do this: Just the outline of the state, the number of districts to divide it into, and the population distribution.
Here in Minnesota, state law requires that city redistricting (into wards & precincts) not cross over the boundaries set for Congressional & State Legislative Districts. Natural dividers (like rivers & creeks) are often used as the borders of these, as are human dividers like major highways & streets, railroad lines, etc.
So it gets much harder to do redistricting in a local, city area.
Island not connected by bridge could be defined (for this purpose) as “contiguous” with the nearest point on the mainland, or the nearest point on a bridged island if that is closer than the mainland.
Actually this definition probably works about the same without reference to bridges.
Try ignoring them, and just draw four districts that are relatively equal in population and compact.
Well, there isn’t really a good way to define compact more rigorously than “compact.” I mean, there might be a scholarly way to measure it, but it’s going to have to be a judgment call.
My opinion now is that single-member districts should be abolished in favor of very large, compact, multi-member districts & proportional representation. (E.g., Florida could be split into 2-5 districts, each with a dozen seats chosen by SNTV.) There is no geographic line possible to draw that is more representative & less of a gerrymander than self-organization.
Kind of a silly thing to say, when folks have already provided good, rigorous ways to define “compact” which don’t require a judgment call.
After playing the game linked above, I have come to a realization. Compactness looks simple, but the situation on the ground remains complex. Maybe compactness is a false good. Why not sort people as nearly as possible into “tribes” (in the Roman sense) according to the identities that make sense to them & let each politician work within that?
Those are judgment calls. I guess the difference is, you can make a judgment call when you make the rule or when you apply it.
Personally, I think we should abolish legislative districts except where they correspond to administrative districts. Leg’ districts as we know them are always going to be an imposition of artificial divisions.
But in the near term, the best political strategy for the out of power is to let the leg’ gerrymander, get your poll data in place, then relocate the voters into the new districts in a reverse gerrymander.
OK, I’ll grant that: When you establish some mathematical definition of “compactness”, you do have to set some threshold of what’s “compact enough” when you write the law. But that only has to be done once, and can’t be gamed thereafter like it could be if you just said “compact” without a definition.
One thing I don’t know and haven’t seen mentioned in this thread: Has any other state tried an amendment like this, that leaves the redistricting with the state legislature but imposes what are supposed to be anti-gerrymandering rules? If so, how did it work out?
I’ve never understood why they just don’t use zip code area boundaries. It would make life so much easier.
“Rep. A represents zip code 77042 and the eastern half of zip code 77077, bounded by Dairy-Ashford Road. Rep. B represents the western half of zip code 77077, bounded by Dairy-Ashford Road, as well as zip code 77082.”
Etc. Oh, wait - that’s too logical. No wonder they don’t do it that way.
In 2008, California passed Prop 11, which said that state legislature boundaries are to be drawn by an independent commission, and that federal House boundaries are still to be drawn by the legislature, but they have to follow the same rules the independent commission does. A copy of the proposition can be found here:
http://ag.ca.gov/cms_pdfs/initiatives/i746_07-0077_Initiative.pdf
The rules that state legislature has to follow are as follows:
- The districts must comply with the Voting Rights Act.
- The district must be contiguous.
- The geographic integrity of counties, cities, neighborhoods, and communities of interest shall be respected to the greatest extent possible so long as it doesn’t conflict with an earlier criteria. Communities of interest don’t include relationships with political parties or candidates
- The district shall be geographically compact to the extent possible so long as it doesn’t conflict with an earlier criteria. Compactness is defined as nearby areas of population not being bypassed for areas of population further away.
Obviously, it’s too early to tell if it worked.
Interestingly, our constitution has a provision that if a municipality straddles more than one legislative district, a resident thereof can represent any of the districts that cover part of it. I suppose that this is a form of “insurance” against people being redlined out of office by a mere block’s worth.
Federally, in terms of the House of Representatives, the legal requirement is that a person be a resident of the state, not the Congressional district. This led to a circumstance like you saw in my parents’ congressional district (NY-20) in March of 2009, where Jim Tedisco got the Republican nomination for the election to replace Kristen Gilibrand, who had been made Senator. Tedisco got the nomination in spite of the fact that he lived in NY-21 instead of NY-20. In practice, though, that probably was one of the factors that contributed to his loss.
It isn’t at all logical.
Zip code areas are based on volume of mail, nothing to do with the number of eligible voters who live there. There are many office buildings that are a complete zip code on their own, but don’t have a single person living in the building. And we have a small town in Minnesota that does the processing for most coupons and mail-in rebates in the country – it is a very small town, about 1,000 houses – yet it has over 20 zip codes assigned to it.
And even if zip codes were uniform with population, they’re still too small. There are over 40,000 zip codes in the US, and only 435 House districts, which means that the average House district will have close to 100 zip codes in it. That’s enough resolution to allow for plenty of gerrymandering.