US House Redistricting: West Virginia

[BigSkyBob]

One can only hope that deliberately violating the State's Constitution backfires on the then governor whom signs the bill.  When state courts insist on enforcing the Constitution,  Republicans will have a governor to veto the next bill the legislature tries. That would be the dummymander to end all dummymanders.

[BigSkyBob]

The judges' order says that the constitution doesn't prohibit splitting counties. I can't copy-paste from it, but it's here, specifically pages 12 and 13. So they may require them to split counties to achieve perfect population equality.

That is quite a stretch for a Federal Judge to tell a state what the meaning of their Constitution is.

[BigSkyBob]

Doesn't a 1.0% deviation save the map?

If that were the de minimis standard it would, but the deviation in Maine (the difference in population between the largest and smallest existing congressional district in Maine as a percentage of the ideal Maine congressional district population) was only 0.65% (8,669 people) and the three-judge court trashed the Democrats in their opinion when the Democrats argued that the existing districts could be used for the 2012 elections.

What is the absolute and percentage deviations in the congressional plan the West Virginia state government adopted again?

Maine did not combine whole counties.

[BigSkyBob]

Doesn't a 1.0% deviation save the map?

If that were the de minimis standard it would, but the deviation in Maine (the difference in population between the largest and smallest existing congressional district in Maine as a percentage of the ideal Maine congressional district population) was only 0.65% (8,669 people) and the three-judge court trashed the Democrats in their opinion when the Democrats argued that the existing districts could be used for the 2012 elections.

What is the absolute and percentage deviations in the congressional plan the West Virginia state government adopted again?

What is the absolute variation the Supreme Court has permitted state legislative elections, and federal Congressional elections?

The Supreme Court, I suggest, set the higher variation for state legislatures because it did not want to strike down whole-county provisions in a number of states. West Virginia has a whole-county provision for federal Congressional districts. I doubt it wants to either strike down whole-county provisions, or demand bizarre shuffling of counties to form non-compact districts just to acheive marginal increases in population equality.