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BumRushDaShow

(170,701 posts)
13. Well
Mon Feb 19, 2018, 03:55 PM
Feb 2018

Looking at the boundaries and some of the reasoning that was proposed for why they did what they did, I found that 2 submissions seemed similar - that was Wolf's and a group called "Fair Democracy" (that I can't find any info on). Also some of the submissions included more than 1 map as an option and one submission I couldn't find an application to read it (it may have been AutoCad).

Since I live in Philly, I focused on what was being proposed in and around Philly - particularly because that is where you see the most gerrymandering going on. Knowing the population of Philly is ~1.57 million and knowing that the average district needs to be ~700K, that means that Philly would obviously need to be divided at least 3 ways, which is fine. But given that Montgomery County is the 3rd largest county in the state (behind Philly and Pittsburgh), the fact that some maps continue to divide it up 3 - 4 ways yet leaves Bucks County, which has a much smaller population, completely intact (with the only overflow coming from NE Philly), bothers me. Because Montco has a population ~800K, that means it would have to be split at least 2 ways, which is fine, but more than that is bothersome.

So I was looking for maps in that direction - i.e., towards allowing Montco to have a rep and then any overflow would go to a 2nd district. The Wolf & Fair Democracy maps basically do that.

Within the city itself, some submissions were attempting to deal with over a century of defacto segregation to allow either 2 majority-minority districts, or at least 1 majority-minority and 1, 50-50 split for the primary city districts. But I also know demographically, there are populations originally from the city that moved a certain direction into the suburbs, but they would still probably have a similar set of needs - so that should be reflected to some degree, on the splits. So for some maps, the split made little sense.

So with all of this in mind. I basically threw out I think 5 maps that split Montco more than 2 ways. That left Wolf's, one of Fair Democracy's, and one of "The Petitioners'" maps. The Petitioners are the group that represents 1 plaintiff from each current congressional district (18 in all).

But this is just me over here in SE PA. I can't speak for how these handle the rest of the state - notably around Allegheny County due to how you have Pittsburgh as part of that (and Pittsburgh's population justifies less than 1/2 a rep so obviously, some version of surrounding suburbs would need to be in there with the city to get the full population for a rep).

Some of the data that was used to generate the statistics for the boundaries was pretty comprehensive - including population, race, economics, education levels, party affiliations, past voting results, etc. Plus you have subjective stuff like common concerns within certain regions, so this is just not an easy thing to do.

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