Talk Elections

I was inspired by France's constituencies for residents overseas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituencies_for_French_residents_overseas).

Using 2000 data, there are about 1.17 million natives of Washington living in the rest of the country. In 2000, the ideal Washington legislative district was about 120,000 people. This would result in about ten abroad districts at approximately 117,000 each. Two states had enough Washingtonians to warrant more than one district. They were Oregon and California, which had about 1.6 and 2.1 seats worth each, respectively. I used 1995-2000 migration data to get an approximate idea of where Washingtonians generally moved, and redistricted accordingly. These are the only two states I did this for.

Map:

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Districts

District 1 (Red) - Portland & Northwest Oregon: 117,370
Unsurprisingly the smallest in land area of the ten districts, given its proximity to WA and the shared Portland-Vancouver metro.

District 2 (Light green) - Rural Oregon, Alaska, and Hawaii: 118,946
Proximity to Oregon again. Only about 11k Washingtonians in Hawaii, but WA has a strong connection with Alaska (about 5% of Alaskans are born in WA).

District 3 (Blue) - Northern California: 114,762
Quite a bit of movement between the Pacific states, no surprise. Presumably a large majority of this is in the Bay Area, but I didn't check.

District 4 (orange) - Southern California: 117,234
Second smallest in terms of land area.

District 5 (purple) - Inland Northwest: 117,307
Another shared metro (Spokane-Couer d'Alene), as well as strong connections in general with ID and MT. While this technically contains SD and NE, the vast majority of the population (about  110k) is in ID+MT+WY, which is why I named it Inland NW.

District 6 (pink) - Southwest: 116,151
Close to half is Arizona, quite a few retirees down there (no surprise). Also, CA's extra tenth of a district (it was 2.1, remember) was shifted here by moving San Bernadino County.

District 7 (brown) - South Central: 118,474
About half in Texas. not too surprising given what a large state it is. Another 30k+ in CO.

District 8 (yellow) - Midwest: 115,636
We've gotten far enough away that the districts are getting pretty big in land area, especially considering their overall population. The Washingtonian population isn't especially concentrated in any one state.

District 9 (dark green) - South: 115,912
Same as above. Worth noting abnormally large number of Washingtonians in VA, due to DC confusion.

District 10 (dark red) - Northeast: 113,914
Same as above. Again, strangely large number of Washingtonians reported in DC and MD, presumably because of idiots who don't know the difference between the state and the city. Even with this artificial boost, this is a pretty big region considering how populous it is.

The numbers don't quite match up. Part of this is certainly due to Puerto Rico (and possibly other territories) that I excluded. I also may have made an error. :P

Neat concept.

This is really cool! No surprise where the highest concentrations of us are.

Well, at least a couple people liked it. :(

Cool concept! I am actually surprised at how many Washingtonians wound up in the South.

I'd guess it's a mix of retirees (though most of ours go to the SW), military families, and DC confusion in VA that gave it an extra boost.

There is actually a lot of two way flow.  For example, 7,000 Washington natives were living in Alabama, and 14,000 Alabama natives were living in Washington.

Maybe a couple of Floridians got married, the husband got a job at Boeing, after having two children they got a divorce and the wife moved back to Florida.  The daughter met someone from Alabama in college, married and they decided to make their home in Alabama.   She can be 58 years old and left Washington when she was 3.

In 2000, there were 5.8 Washingtonians.  0.7 million were foreign-born.  2.8 million were native, and 2.4 million were immigrants from other States (or DC, Puerto Rico, or natural-born overseas).

Meanwhile, 1.2 million persons born in Washington now live in other states (plus an unknown number living in other countries).

Arguably, the instate districts should also be adjusted.  If Washington is giving voting rights to natives living in Kansas, then it is likely that Kansas is giving voting rights to Kansans living in Washington.   So you end up state-switchers getting extra votes.

Alternatively, you could give one vote based on state of birth and one vote based on state of resident.  So natives living in state would get two votes.

Based on that there would be:

29 LD Washington born living in Washington.
12 LD Natural-born living in Washington
3 LD Foreign-born living in Washington
6 LD Washington-born living elsewhere in the USA.

^ I considered that problem, but chose to ignore it. :P

Where are the stats for this?  I'm interested in doing more.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/migration/about/placeofbirth.html

In particular: State of Residence in 2000 by State of Birth

I'm not sure how bgwah used the migration data for.

Has anyone ever used the PUMS data?

Can we do the same thing for Southern Californians? It seems to me for every Washingtonian that moves from King county to Socal, 3 move up here.

I'm not aware of any county of residence by state of birth statistics. So I used to county-to-county migration data to get a general idea of where Washingtonians usually moved within a state. It's not perfect, but it seemed like the best solution considering I didn't want to just draw a straight line through the middle of California and Oregon. :)