Particularly where you're adding continguous areas in, to crack or pack a district.
For instance consider a state with one large urban area representing nearly half the state population, and the rest small cities, towns, and rural spaces, with a total of six CDs. The central urban area is deep blue, but it is surrounded by bright red suburbs. The northern end of the state with rural territory and a few small cities may be blue-with-purple bits, the south with a small city and lots of rural area deep red with a few purple bits in the city. Pre-gerrymandering, this state reliably sent three Democrats and two Republicans to Congress, and usually four Democrats and two Republicans. Occasionally one seat that represented northern rural areas plus the north outlying urban suburbs switched up to GOP, but usually the balance was 4/2 and 3 of the Dem seats were quite reliable.
Perfectly legitimate-appearing maps can be drawn, That would "crack" two of the dark blue mostly-urban districts by creating a packed "central" district conceded to the Dems, and pulling contiguous purply neighborhoods into line with those bright red burbs, putting one more into the GOP bag, tipping the balance on that switcheroo district to "reliable GOP" and leaving one more district up for grabs. Then you have your reliable GOP south district, your mostly-blue north end, and hey, presto! A perfectly reasonable map has changed the state balance to 3 GOP, 2 Dem and a switcheroo.
BUT with half the state's population in the bright blue Big City, this model would indicate exactly how those votes have been laid to waste.
I like it!
interestedly,
Bright
= new reply since forum marked as read
