SCOTUS Upholds Ruling Against 28 General Assembly Districts

[BoBromhal]

Originally Posted by jroddaman

The Republicans will state to the three judge panel that there will not be enough time to redraw the districts (since when you change the boundary to one, you inevitably change other boundaries. To the contrary, this is a much quicker and fairer solution that can be applied across the state.

Instead of leaving the district mapping up to the biased legislature (on both sides of the aisle), perhaps we should leverage our census data and apply the shortest-splitline method across the state. This essentially splits districts by population count and applies boundaries based on the shortest line to divide up the population evenly (does not take county, city, or geographical boundaries into any account other than the state border).

See video by CFP Grey here for details.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A

We use this method, we can avoid long and costly lawsuits that eventually cost the taxpayer money, and can use an unbiased source that neither party could argue against in terms of bias.

sounds great - and I haven't watched the video yet ... but good luck getting either side not to squeal like a stuck pig about such a method.

[BoBromhal]

^^ since the link shown at the end of the video, which the narrator said would show how to model your state, was broken...it's hard to pass further judgement. But still, districts should be as compact as possible, and represent the interests of related parties appropriately.

[jroddaman]

I googled Shortest Splitline Algorithm, and found results that led to a picture of an example for NC from 2009 data.

http://rangevoting.org/Splitline2009/nc.png

Since this is based on historical data, I would anticipate the borders would change more to cluster around the Triangle and Charlotte due to noted migration to the cities from rural areas and taking into account transplants from other states tending to settle near economic hubs.