Redistricting Washington with ten districts

[CultureKing]

Wow, a lot of work has been put into this. Awesome. I think it is necessary to split counties in Washington. The only reasonable cross-Cascades region is in the south/Columbia River area. We only have 39 counties, and it is extremely hard to have balanced, reasonable districts without county splitting. If the Olympia-Chelan district actually happened, I think there would be a lot of people screaming, "yikes!" Olympia and Wenatchee just don't go together well at all.
However I really like your idea of the transportation connections, but there must be a better way of creating districts than connecting far flung, polarized locations.

Yeah, there would be screams of foul, I would be one of them. Basically in Washington there is a standing of trying to keep everything as simple as possible when it comes to the districts and I have a feeling that the new district would indeed be and Olympic penninsula with Olympia and/or Bremerton district.

[CultureKing]

This is an interesting idea, but I need to understand some of your non-connections.

Some land questions:

Why doesn't Skagit connect to Okanogan by way of hwy 20, or Snohomish to Chelan by way of US 2?

The distance from Mount Vernon to Omak is close to 200 miles, and the road is closed in winter.

A better case could be made for the Everett-Wenatchee link via US-2, which also forms one of the two rail links into the Seattle area.  It is also much shorter. 

A slight problem is that the road crosses into King County for a significant distance.   On the other hand, it could be argued that the area in the Skykowish watershed in NE King County should not be associated with a Seattle area district, unless it also included the lower parts of the watershed in Snohomish County.

There should be some discretion in defining the units used in reapportionment.  A State could define primary, secondary, and tertiary units.  The units must fully nest, and also provide 100% coverage of the containing unit.  There need not be secondary and tertiary units throughout a State, but there would have to be a consistent basis of definition.

In Illinois, you would have (1) counties; (2) cities and townships; and (3) Chicago neighborhoods.  Legislative districts and city council districts should be avoided.  The other units need not have permanent boundaries and can be adjusted to reflect changes in development, annexations, etc. 

There would have to be some rule requiring definition of subordinate level units (for example if a unit had 20% of the population of a CD - this would trigger the tertiary definition in Chicago and Rockford(?).  I would expect that Illinois would go ahead and define secondary units statewide, simply because the townships exist and are well recognized, even though it is unlikely that they would be used to divide counties.

There could be further adjustments.  For example, the part of Chicago that is in DuPage County, could be considered as part of the Cook County primary unit so that Chicago could then be fully contained as a secondary unit.  There is township just to the east of O'hare that is fragmented by Chicago's annexation.  These could be treated as separate secondary units, or as a single unit (I would consider political units to be self-contiguous, even if physically separated parts, or perhaps as parts of other townships.

Back to Washington.  Since they don't use townships as units of governments, cities might form the basis of secondary units.  But they don't provide 100% coverage, so Washington would have to define some sort of extended cities, at least in the larger counties, and these might well extend across county boundaries.  And then, Washington might consider using these extended cities as the primary units.  It could well make more sense to simply start adding cities as you started south from Bellingham, and not worry that you were going to have to end somewhere in the middle of Snohomish County.

Why doesn't Okanagan connect to Grant on hwy 155 over the Grand Coulee Dam?

The border is a little over 1 mile long.  Based on my corner test it is less than 1% connectivity.  I also rejected the much longer border (almost 6 miles) between Okanogan and Lincoln counties for the same reason (about 3% connectivity).

Some sea questions:

Doesn't the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston link Snohomish to Kitsap?

San Juan to Island uses the same ferry as San Juan to Skagit. Isn't that the direct route to Skagit and therefore excluded?

You are correct in both cases.  There could be a case for San Juan to Island based on the route cutting through the corner or edge of Skagit County.  The peninsula that Anacortes is on, looks to be similar to the islands of the other counties.

Technically Anacortes is on an island.

[CultureKing]

Wow, a lot of work has been put into this. Awesome. I think it is necessary to split counties in Washington. The only reasonable cross-Cascades region is in the south/Columbia River area. We only have 39 counties, and it is extremely hard to have balanced, reasonable districts without county splitting. If the Olympia-Chelan district actually happened, I think there would be a lot of people screaming, "yikes!" Olympia and Wenatchee just don't go together well at all.
However I really like your idea of the transportation connections, but there must be a better way of creating districts than connecting far flung, polarized locations.

The southern crossing is traditionally used for CDs, but it actually a weaker link.  I think you would find that most people in Yakima would head up to Seattle for shopping, rathern than to Vancouver.  More of the population along the Columbia is actually in Oregon.  And if you insist on only the single route, you end up with having to split Yakima County, possibly the city of Yakima itself, and Cowlitz County, possibly very near to Longview.

The reason they use the south is because it is a physical gap in the mountain and also there are people who actually live on that link between the two sides of Washington (otherwise you simply have a 50-75 mile long highway but no people...)

[CultureKing]

The third way goes across the central Cascades. This can use either Stevens Pass to Wenatchee or Snoqualmie Pass to Ellensburg. Either of these will link Wenatchee or Yakima to suburban Seattle. My version below includes a mix of population from the east in both the south and central corridors. It is possible to make it central only as well by extending the Yakima district well to the west.

Arguably, Skamania and Klickitat are best placed in a western district due to their links along the Columbia to Vancouver.

Besides US 2 over Stevens Pass Stevens Pass web cam there is the main northern US transcontinental railroad route.  Chelan County was set off from Kittitas County in the 1899 because it was so difficult to travel to the county seat in Ellensburg in winter.  Travellers had to travel via Seattle or Spokane by railroad.City of Wenatchee - Great Northern Railroad

I don't think there would be any toleration of any east-west connections except for the Columbia route in the south, the passes are just too vulnerable to the weather and having an entire mountain range make a 50 mile barrier between two sides of a congressional district would just be too much.

[CultureKing]

I'm going to try and redistrict Idaho with 3 districts. Which it may get 2020 if it keeps growing at its current pace. Its not guaranteed, but its certainly possible.

Your challenge: Gerrymander Idaho to the point where 1 out of the three districts is Democrat-favored (no one tell him its impossible!)