Iowa-style Redistricting II: New England Towns

[traininthedistance]

Here's a first crack at NJ, closely based on some other maps I've made:



1: 528
2: 748
3: -905
4: 372
5: 123
6: 436
7: -90, 49.3% white VAP
8: -850
9: -79
10: -475, 45.5% black VAP
11: -264
12: 454, 37.6% hispanic VAP

It is not possible to satisfy the VRA without splitting Newark and Jersey City at the very least, and my previous attempts at clean maps have generally split Elizabeth and a couple Essex County towns as well, they may be necessary too.  Since we can't do that, I elected to go for compactness rather than maximizing minority percentages.  I also tried to give lip service to respecting county boundaries as well.

This map can almost certainly be improved, I'll give it a shot sometime later.

[traininthedistance]

Rhode Island:



Blue district is -104, green is +103.

While I haven't rigorously proved this is optimal, I'd be shocked if a closer map was found.

[traininthedistance]

I suspect perfect equality is going to be hard to make in DRA for Maine, since the voting districts sometimes contain multiple towns, as well as amalgamating wide swaths of the unincorporated territory.  (Yes, Maine has unincorporated territory, which is subdivided into mostly-unpopulated townships and gores.  It's run by the state rather than by counties).

I got it down to 30 and 31, but lost that map when I tried to improve it.

[traininthedistance]

Perfection is possible in New Hampshire:



Except it's not perfect since the only road up to the northernmost towns in the blue district  (Errol and a couple mostly unpopulated grants) passes through the green district.  There may be a map without that problem, but I'm not the one to draw it.

[traininthedistance]

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.

This would be a good idea for NJ (and also for PA and NY, assuming you find some satisfactory way to deal with Philly, NYC, Hempstead, and Brookhaven); and it would work similarly well in most of the Midwest, where rural townships aren't necessarily important or powerful, but they do exist across (almost) the entire state.

This isn't really necessary in New England, my sense is that the only counties in New England which really mean anything at all to their residents are Berkshire and Aroostook.  I guess Nantucket and Dukes too, basically just the parts with a tangible geographic separation from the rest of the state.

[traininthedistance]

This uglier NJ map drops the maximum deviation to under 500:



1: -328
2: -485
3: 170
4: 444
5: -177
6: 268
7: 490, 49.5% White VAP
8: -19
9: 452
10: -360, 42.3% Black VAP
11: -425
12: -32, 41.8% Hispanic VAP

Some more improvement is probably possible, but I suspect not much, and certainly any closer map will flaunt county lines even worse than this one.  The large towns in Newark/Jersey City area and southern Middlesex both provide significant obstacles to any further improvement.