Iowa-style Redistricting II: New England Towns

[jimrtex]

As many have noted, counties are not the critical unit in New England. In fact counties have been dissolved as governing bodies in CT, RI, and parts of MA. Towns (and cities when so named) are the fundamental unit. For these states keeping towns intact is far more important than keeping counties (or their historical boundaries) intact.

So, the challenge here is to divide the New England states into CDs while keeping towns intact and minimizing the average population deviation. Now that I have a statistical model from the whole-county states, I'll be interested in comparing to these states with far more jurisdictions to manipulate.

As before the rule requires no district to have more than a 0.5% deviation from the ideal, and point contiguity is not allowed. Bonus points for making districts that are connected by roads internally, but we won't let that stand in the way of a great plan, such as the near-perfect split of ID.

Also, some have suggested that NJ could be on this list as well, so I'll include it (boroughs, cities townships, etc all count as towns). However, I won't extend to NY and PA since both have cities that exceed the population of one CD, and can't really fit this rule.

CT (5 CDs, 169 towns)
ME (2 CDs, 433 towns)
MA (9 CDs, 351 towns)
NH (2 CDs, 234 towns)
NJ (12 CDs, 566 towns)
RI (2 CDs, 39 towns)

Perhaps require modest recognition of counties:

Two districts may split (share parts) of at most one county.  This probably would result in better compactness, and would generally have reasonable road connectivity (you might have to dip across the district line near district boundaries, but not to great an extent.

Conceivably there could be a bonus for fewest county fragments, but there is a risk that in a state like New Hampshire, there might an extreme split that happens not to split any counties.

This might also be a better starting point for states to the west of New England which have a well-developed system of townships.

[jimrtex]

Perhaps require modest recognition of counties:

Two districts may split (share parts) of at most one county.  This probably would result in better compactness, and would generally have reasonable road connectivity (you might have to dip across the district line near district boundaries, but not to great an extent.

Conceivably there could be a bonus for fewest county fragments, but there is a risk that in a state like New Hampshire, there might an extreme split that happens not to split any counties.

This might also be a better starting point for states to the west of New England which have a well-developed system of townships.

For southern New England counties have little meaning except for history and the Census Bureau. Judicial districts have replaced that function of counties in those three states, and are not necessarily co-terminous with the old counties. Counties still have a judicial role in northern New England and maintain a governing body, but it is weak compared to town government.

As one heads out of New England, counties become stronger, so there I agree that some hybrid between county integrity and smaller unit integrity makes more sense where counties alone can't suffice. NJ sits in between. Town government is important, and when NJ does redistricting they take note of the number of municipalities, not counties, that are split. I don't have that same sense of concern about county integrity, but I would defer to current residents who could help on that point.

I'm suggesting use of counties more as a an indication of compactness.   Counties are too few and too populous to be used in New England, while towns may be too numerous and two small to prevent gerrymandering (see the awful Massachusetts congressional map and the original Gerry-mander).

An alternative might be to measure compactness based on the number of town lines that are used as district boundaries (this is easier to measure than distance)