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[Mephansteras]

Maybe more states will do redistricting the way California does now: By having it done not by the legislators but by an independent committee.

We just got the first results of that this year, and I have to say the map does look a good bit more reasonable now. Hopefully that trend will continue.

[Jervill]

Maryland's map is extremely ugly mostly due to the restraints of the Voting Rights Act, IIRC.

Also, there are a couple of states with independent commissions doing redistricting.
List (by memory): AZ (9 seats), CA (53 seats), CT (5 seats), ID (2 seats), IA (4 seats), WA (10 seats), NJ (11 seats?).

Of course, other states had court drawn maps in 2010 as well, which are generally fair.

[mainiac]

Yes GreatJustice, I'm sure you know better then every fucking politician and political expert in the country.

[GreatJustice]

Yes GreatJustice, I'm sure you know better then every fucking politician and political expert in the country.

wut

[FearfulJesuit]

Ah, I've found a map of the United States districted as if it were a single state with 435 seats (ie no attention is paid to state boundaries in regards to House districts). Behold:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As usually, it neglects Alaska and Hawai'i (and maybe Puerto Rico in a few years); possibly those could be the only states to have their own apportionment. They only have enough people for three representatives, anyways.

I would be very interested if someone has taken the time to see what the party makeup of this theoretical House would be...

Edit: Apparently, splitlining has a tendency to effectively disenfranchise urban voters; for example, under its system California would send more Republicans to the House than Democrats, even though there are more Democrats than Republicans among the state's voters.

Perhaps a solution is to declare everything within a ten-mile radius of the corporate limits of any city with a population over a million to be, for the purposes of redistricting, its own state. This could mean greater polarization between rural and urban congressmen, but as it stands, there's a great deal of polarization in the country anyways, and at least both sides would get more or less what they wanted in regards to congressmen.

[mainiac]

Maryland's map is extremely ugly mostly due to the restraints of the Voting Rights Act, IIRC.

If you are talking about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that doesn't apply to Maryland IIRC.

I would be very interested if someone has taken the time to see what the party makeup of this theoretical House would be...

My gut tells me that this map would give the republicans a deadlock on the house about as severe as the current gerrymandering does.  This has the conditions favorable to republicans, tightly packed urban only districts and black districts in the southern states diluted out among the white districts.  Democrats do better under mapping where urban votes and rural votes are more mixed together and where there is some minority representation in the south.

[DJ]

How flexible are the population size requirements for a district? Would it be feasible to have one district be one county? It would still make for reasonably fair division, with compact shapes because the voters won't accept being assigned to administrative and emergency services half way across the state. And unlike purely mathematical solutions, it would respect history and cultural identity.

[FearfulJesuit]

Maryland's map is extremely ugly mostly due to the restraints of the Voting Rights Act, IIRC.

If you are talking about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that doesn't apply to Maryland IIRC.

I would be very interested if someone has taken the time to see what the party makeup of this theoretical House would be...

My gut tells me that this map would give the republicans a deadlock on the house about as severe as the current gerrymandering does.  This has the conditions favorable to republicans, tightly packed urban only districts and black districts in the southern states diluted out among the white districts.  Democrats do better under mapping where urban votes and rural votes are more mixed together and where there is some minority representation in the south.

OK, so let's look at the requirement where any city with more than a million people is considered its own state. The problem, of course, is defining that. Population within corporate limits produces a counterintuitive list: Virginia Beach has more people than Atlanta, and the I've-never-heard-of-it Mesa, Arizona beats them both, as well as beating Cleveland, New Orleans and St. Louis. Aurora, Colorado beats Pittsburgh. Tulsa beats Minneapolis. El Paso beats Boston and Seattle. Only nine cities (New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Philly, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and Dallas) reach the million mark! And the next two are...San Jose, California and Jacksonville, Florida. We need to do better.

Metropolitan measures are better, if we could get a constitutional definition of a metro area so that you can't gerrymander by packing the Census Bureau with party favorites. Currently, here's the metro areas (Metropolitan Statistical Areas) that hit the million mark (there are 51 of them):

New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, DC, Miami, Atlanta, Boston

San Fran, Riverside (CA), Detroit, Phoenix, Seattle, Minneapolis, San Diego, Tampa, St. Louis, Baltimore

Denver, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, Sacramento, Orlando, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City, Las Vegas

San Jose, Columbus (OH), Charlotte, Austin, Indianapolis, VA Beach, Nashville, Providence, Milwaukee, Jacksonville

Memphis, Louisville (KY), OK City, Richmond, Hartford, New Orleans, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, Buffalo, Birmingham (AL), Rochester

The definition of a metro area is of course really nebulous, and would be hard to pull off. Still, this would ensure that cities aren't disenfranchised. The rest of the country could be treated as one large city that would be divided according to splitline...although I do have to wonder how you pull off splitline in a territory with numerous holes in it. Splitline seems to require a modicum of topological continuity, which is probably why that big-ass nationwide map I posted didn't cover Alaska or Hawaii.

[mainiac]

How flexible are the population size requirements for a district? Would it be feasible to have one district be one county? It would still make for reasonably fair division, with compact shapes because the voters won't accept being assigned to administrative and emergency services half way across the state. And unlike purely mathematical solutions, it would respect history and cultural identity.

Counties have nowhere near equal populations.  On  the high end we have LA with 10 million people in one county.  Then there is Wyoming which divides 600k people into 23 counties.

This would just be a massive gerrymander in favor of the republicans.  The geographically concentrated democrats get packed into high democrat urban districts while republicans win the still uncompetative but not by as large margins rural districts.  It wouldn't be surprising to see results like Democrats winning the popular vote 60%-40% but not controlling the house under this system.  You'd be taking a map like they have in Pennsylvania and extending it to the entire country across state boundaries.

[Jervill]

For redistricting, it's helpful to look at something like Dave's Redistricting App which allows you to draw your own districts.  I find it also helps to know where the lesser known population areas of each state are.

[RedKing]

How flexible are the population size requirements for a district? Would it be feasible to have one district be one county? It would still make for reasonably fair division, with compact shapes because the voters won't accept being assigned to administrative and emergency services half way across the state. And unlike purely mathematical solutions, it would respect history and cultural identity.

Counties have nowhere near equal populations.  On  the high end we have LA with 10 million people in one county.  Then there is Wyoming which divides 600k people into 23 counties.

Agreed. Even within one state, you're liable to see vast variation. NC has 100 counties. The largest (Mecklenburg, home to Charlotte) has 944,000 people. The smallest (Tyrell, a coastal county almost entirely composed of sparsely-inhabited swampland) has 4,364.

And with larger cities, they're often spread across multiple counties. It's also not uncommon to get large metro areas which are multi-city, multi-county conglomerates like Raleigh-Durham-Cary (or its predecessor Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill). These would be treated as multiple smaller (~400-500,000) units when in fact the reality on the ground is that they operate more like a single large city. Other, more well-known examples would be Minneapolis-St.Paul and Dallas-Ft.Worth.

[FearfulJesuit]

Or the Five Boroughs of New York City.

Frankly, maybe the whole state idea is outdated. It made sense in 1800 when political divisions were across state lines. Not so much now; a political subdivision of the New York City metro area as itself makes much more sense than New York State.

Maybe we should divide the country into new "states", each of which has a major metro area as an anchor?

Also, Jervill, Dave's Redistricting crashes for me.

[Jervill]

Damn, it's a useful program when it runs.  I can't get it to run on my new machine, either.

[misko27]

Why does everyone want NYC to be a state? I like upstate. It's like the farming-based territorial holdings. Although we could annex parts of jersey

[darkflagrance]

I'd be done with being annexed by New York. Connecticut and New Jersey are basically colonial satellites at this point.