State Legislature Redistricting

[Brittain33]

If you look at the map, districts 23, 24, 16, and 15 could have all been drawn to not split counties like that.

I know you know this and also we agree this map is quite the Dem gerrymander in places... do you think it matters if they split counties or not, since county government is relatively weak? It could be even more democratic this way because it keeps the county organizations in competition with each other rather than have a single county party anoint its representative for the race, as happens so often.

[Brittain33]

I won't disagree with the assessment that attaching South Brunswick to Hunterdon County is a gerrymander. (I picked my current avatar a few weeks ago for a reason...)

The commission set-up does appear to be a game theory test case for how not to get the results you seek. The optimum strategy is to design the maximal gerrymander you can achieve that is still less gerrymandered than the other party's, not to achieve a compromise map.

[Brittain33]

I wonder if people who consider Obama's visit to the IOC a massive failure will say the same about Chris Christie's attempt to personally lobby Rosenthal into choosing the R gerrymander over the D gerrymander.

[Brittain33]

Is it reasonable to say you can guess which districts favor Democrats based on underweighting or overweighting by population?

[Brittain33]

SCOFLA

Ah, such memories of Free Republic in December 2000.