US House Redistricting: Maryland

[jimrtex]

What happens if District of Columbia residents vote in Maryland elections like they have in the past, and Maryland (+DC) is apportioned a 9th representative?

[jimrtex]

It's obvious that the jump across the Chesapeake is not considered taboo. But, from a community of interest standpoint, what is the rationale for including a chunk of Anne Arundel County, as opposed to some of Baltimore County, with the Eastern Shore? Surely the case can be made that once Harford County is placed in the district, some of Baltimore County can be included as well?

Queen Anne's is part of the Baltimore Metropolitan Statistical Area.

[jimrtex]

Does anyone feel like they need a shower?

This whole redistricting process is unclean and f'ed up. Not sure whether MD and TN are where the deals need to be made. What sort of map will be coming out of Ohio? Pennsylvania? Maybe the Dems feel they need to retaliate for that? Let's just have a constitutional convention or something, take redistricting out of the hands of the pigs, and be done with it.

Wait, has the Ohio map been released? Did they create a Columbus district? If not, then the MD dems should go for the juggular and severe it with one bite. 8-0 map is in order, I think.

The GOP ceded Columbus. Their map is a still massive cf however. All the Pubbies here agree on that one.    Among other things, they chopped Toledo in half.  But there is just so much more. My map looks like a veritable non partisan plan in comparison. Check out the Ohio thread, and you shall see.

The Republican plan really isn't so much partisan, as it is incumbent protection, which is hard to do when you have 13 of 18 seats and the state is losing two districts.  If Kaptur and Kucinich didn't live so close to each other it wouldn't have been so easy to pair them.

And 13/18 x 16 does equal 12 (so it keeps the same partisan balance).

[jimrtex]

I'm not sure I follow why this is more "non-partisan". I also don't follow your split analysis. I count 9 county splits in four counties, using the rule that districts entirely within a county are not a split piece. That's the same number of splits in my map.

The way I would count splits is to determine the minimum number of districts that must be included in a county, and then add up the population from any excess districts.

So if a county has less population than needed for a district, then you count the population of the smaller fragment(s).   If a county has more than enough for a 1+ districts, you count beginning with the 3rd largest fragment.

Don't allow double spanning, where two counties are split between the same pair of districts, and limit the total number of county fragments to Ndistricts X 2.

The rule for house districts in the Ohio Constitution seems like a good idea, but probably forces more splits of smaller counties, because they can be arbitrarily split.  And see the truly awful district joining a little bit of Mahoning, Stark, etc.

Even if a district is wholly in a county, you still have to delineate the district (postcards to voters, ballot printing, signs for district boundaries, etc.).

It is possibly an artifact of the old apportionment scheme where counties were given temporal fractions of representatives rather than spatial fractions.

A county entitled to 1.4 representatives would have been entitled to one representative for an entire apportionment decade, and a second representative for 4/10s of the terms (2 terms).   Under the current constitution, the fraction is represented by a portion of the county joined to portions of other counties.