NY with 26 CDs in 2020

[jimrtex]

I didn't realize Ontario was part of the Rochester UCC. I will fix that when I return from having a late lunch. I tend to doubt that Wayne will join the Rochester UCC. It's losing population. If and when it does, adjustments can be made, but NY-24 has nice lines, and adding Ontario to it would be unfortunate, and mess up the map, in particular NY-27 and NY-23 I suspect. The real map drawers are not going to care of course whether Ontario (or Wayne) is part of the UCC of not. It certainly is not obvious on the ground. 

The Rochester Urbanized Area links up with Victor along I-490, and continues on as far as Canandaigua.  Rochester is not exactly on Lake Ontario, though it has annexed to touch the lake.  The major growth is to the west, which is all in Monroe County since Rochester is to the east of the center.   The northwest corner of Ontario is west of the western edge of Wayne, and thus Ontario is as close as Wayne to Rochester.  The Rochester UA has linked into Wayne, but the roadways don't provide the growth opportunity of an interstate.

Ontario is one of the more marginal UCC counties.  Tweaking the formula a bit would drop it.

[jimrtex]

Some thought perhaps should be given to upping the UCC county test from 40% to 50% perhaps. How was the 40% figure arrived at? Ontario County as Jimtex suggested is kind of an ersatz UCC county.

Ontario qualifies under the greater than 25K in an urbanized area rule.  To be a metropolitan statistical area (as opposed to a micropolitan statistical area) requires that the core urban area be an urbanized area.  UCC's are based on metropolitan statistical areas.  An urbanized area is an urban area with more than 50K.

The reasoning for including counties with 25K or more in an urbanized area, is that 25K is half the population needed to qualify as an urbanized area.  To be an urbanized area, but have between 25K and 50K in a county requires that the urbanized area straddle the county line.  And thus the population can be thought of as substantial contribution to the urban area qualifying as an urbanized area, and the core-based statistical area qualifying as a metropolitan statistical area.

In this particular case, Ontario has absolutely nothing to do with Rochester being a metropolitan statistical area.   But to exclude it might require a definition based on relative contribution of a county to the metropolitan statistical area population.

While the 40% rule technically applies to all counties, it only really applies to two small counties.  Nicollet, MN and Montour, PA.   Nicollet only has 13K in the Mankato Urbanized Area, but that is 41% of the county's population.  That is, the urbanized area portion of Nicollet really does characterize the county's population.

Originally there was consideration of 25K/25% or 50K/50% rules.   40K/40% was an alternative.

[jimrtex]

Thanks for the elaboration. "Straddle" means the line of the urbanized area is connected at some point (no matter how small) to the county line of the other UCC county?

Straddle means the urbanized area is in two or more counties.

Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas are collectively Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSA).

The core of a CBSA is an urban area with a population greater than 10,000.  This includes urbanized areas, which have a population greater than 50,000, but urban clusters with a population greater than 10,000.

The census bureau first defines the central counties of potential.  Central counties are based on the UA with the largest population within a county.  In the Rochester area, the Rochester urbanized area is the most populous urban area in Monroe and Ontario counties.  But the Newark urban cluster is the largest urban area in Wayne County.  Newark UC has 13K population in the county vs. about 12K for the Rochester UA.

So Monroe and Ontario are the central counties for a potential Rochester, NY CBSA, while Wayne is a central county for a potential Newark, NY CBSA.  Outlying counties are added based on commuting patterns into the central counties.  In this process, central counties of a potential  CBSA can become an outlying county of another CBSA.

In this case, Wayne became an outlying county of the Rochester, NY CBSA, and there is no Newark, NY CBSA.   Livingston, Orleans, and Yates are the other outlying counties of the Rochester, NY CBSA.  Yates is included based on commuting into Monroe and Ontario counties, while there is likely commuting into Rochester from Yates, I suspect that most of the commuting is into Ontario County.

A county can become a central county with just a very small part of a urbanized area (5000) so long as the urbanized area is the largest in the county.  Wayne has enough of the Rochester UA for it to be a central county of the Rochester CBSA - it is just that Newark is slightly larger.

The 25K standard for a UCC requires a larger dense population than the census bureau does for making a county a central county.

[jimrtex]

It looks like you chop towns in Westchester. I assumed that villages were like in MI, and subsidiary to towns that are the appropriate entity to keep intact. Is your experience there telling you that towns are less important than villages?

A reasonable case could be made for use of villages in Westchester County.

In Abate v Mundt, the SCOTUS upheld the use of towns for apportionment of county legislators in Rockland County, even though the deviation range was more than 10%.  Abate v Mundt was one of the cases that established the 10% safe harbor for deviation range.

If the deviation is less than 10%, the burden in on the plaintiff to prove a violation of equal protection.  If the deviation was greater than 10%, then the governmental entity must provide justification for the excess deviation.  The SCOTUS found that that the interlocking nature of the town and county governments justified the excess deviation.

Abate v Mundt is sometimes used as justification for weighted voting because its districts were based on towns.  But Rockland County did not use weighted voting.  It apportioned legislators among the five towns in the county.

It is also sometimes used to argue against the use of wards and weighted voting in Hudson.  But an argument that wards aren't the same as towns does not mean that the use of wards can not be justified.  And in any case, Hudson is within the 10% safe harbor.

Two decades later, a federal district court in Abate v Rockland County Legislature determined that Rockland County could not apportion legislators among the towns of the county.  The deviation range had increased substantially.  The court also found that most people in Rockland County identified with their village or school district rather than their town.  Villages and school districts were not contained within towns.  The court may have been attempting to rationalize their decision, and avoiding getting into a discussion of the maximum deviation that could be used for an apportionment scheme.   That is, if 12% is OK, but 20% is not; what about 18% or 14%?  Rockland County now has single member districts that largely ignore town boundaries.

New York only has 62 cities, which must be chartered by the state legislature.  The latest (last?) city, Rye, was chartered in 1943.  A city is outside any town, and is therefore a subdivision of a county, while also being a municipality.  Cities are somewhat akin to independent cities in Virginia, but rather being independent of any county, they are independent of any town.

Villages are the only local government that can be created by the people.  Residents of a village, are also residents of their towns.  Villages may span town and even county boundaries.  Villages are more like cities in the South and West, where persons can be resident in both a city and a county. 

Villages are particularly prevalent in suburban areas of NYC, where they have developed to provide municipal services, which towns were ill-equipped to do, and their boundaries may more closely match current land use.

[jimrtex]

This is a good proxy for what the commission will draw and this is probably what gets adopted if the GOP still controls the state senate in 2021.  However, my understanding is that the NY legislature can vote down the commission maps and take control of the process?  So, in the event of full Dem control, how ugly would they have to get to draw 23 >60% Obama districts?  Would 24 be viable while respecting the VRA?

Either house or the governor can block the first commission plan.  In that case, the commission submits another plan.   If that is rejected, then the legislature takes over, but they must follow the same criteria as the commission, in particular:

"Districts shall not be drawn to discourage competition or for the purpose of favoring or disfavoring incumbents  or  other  particular  candidates  or  political  parties.  The  commission  shall  consider  the maintenance of cores of existing districts, of pre-existing political subdivisions, including counties, cities, and towns, and of communities of interest."

The supreme court has original jurisdiction over (any) lawsuits filed against a plan.

The commission should be more transparent in its process.  Legislative redistricting is often done by a few members, with perhaps adjustments made to secure votes on the redistricting bill or other bills.  If a commission plan is rejected by the legislature, they might be expected to explain why they rejected it.  If the commission plans are rejected, and the legislature passes a plan that is quite dissimilar, a court reviewing the plan will be able to consider the commission plans as proof that the legislative plan violates the constitution.  If the legislature fails to approve any plan, then a special master is likely to start with the commission plan.

[jimrtex]

My understanding of Gingles is that if you don't have 50% in an area, no VRA district is required. So presumably if a black VRA district is required in Queens in addition to the two in Brooklyn, then there is a finding that a suitably "compact" area exists with the population of a CD that is at least 50% for a single minority (compact often loosely construed). My observation is that once there is that finding, 50% BVAP becomes something of a safe harbor. When a map goes below 50% BVAP and is challenged in court then the parties trot out their dueling experts to determine whether or not the sub-50% district can in fact perform for the minority. When courts are called upon to draw the map and a VRA district is required, they tend to go for the safe harbor and avoid that type of expert analysis.

I'm not saying that either of us would like such a district. I am saying that the track record of court-drawn VRA district tends towards meeting the population goals of the Gingles test. I am also saying that if you want to show your plan to NY bloggers (or other interested parties), then it is easiest to justify a district that is at 50%, since we haven't actually done the ecological inference or other techniques needed to demonstrate minority performance. I also think that if one is showing the plan to other parties, then there is utility in pointing out that if one wants to maintain 50% it will require a CD more strangely shaped than the area is used to.

In NYC, the candidate of choice may be the candidate chosen in the Democratic primary, so you might be forced to push BVAP up over 50% in order to let Asian and Hispanic voters an opportunity to elect their candidate of choice in "their" districts.

[jimrtex]

How is the commission appointed? Has this all been enacted in law now? Is it just for CD's?

Two members appointed by each of the four legislative leaders, who then appoint two persons not affiliated with either major party.  It has authority over all three plans.  The good citizens of New York approved it last November.

http://ballotpedia.org/New_York_Redistricting_Commission_Amendment,_Proposal_1_%282014%29]Proposition 1[/url]

Towards the bottom is a link to "Proposal 1" which has the actual language.  There was a lot of gobbledygook language about senate and assembly districts, much of which was ruled unconstitutional 50 years ago, which now has the commission language grafted to it.

The assembly districts sort of comply with the constitution.  No district crosses any of the 5 NYC borough lines, and only one district crosses the Nassau-Suffolk line (albeit two parcels connected by part of a barrier island), and two districts are share between Putnam and Westchester.

Upstate, county lines are sometimes observed and other times not.

[jimrtex]

In NYC, the candidate of choice may be the candidate chosen in the Democratic primary, so you might be forced to push BVAP up over 50% in order to let Asian and Hispanic voters an opportunity to elect their candidate of choice in "their" districts.

Except that there are next to no Pubs on the ground to be seen. They are in those zones basically next to extinct. And I really can't think of an instance where getting the BVAP higher, would also get the Hispanic percentage higher in an adjacent CD. Just the opposite actually, since some precincts have considerable numbers of both Hispanics and blacks (most dramatically along the border of my NY-09 and NY-12). And the black percentage went down in NY-14 because after NY-16 took in the white areas on the west side of the Bronx, it then needed to take some black areas farther east, while avoiding taking Hispanic precincts.

Which is why a functional test is whether the protected group can choose their candidate of choice in the Democratic primary.  If the group you are protecting is Hispanic or Asian, then not only do you have to keep their CVAP high, you need to keep that of the BCVAP as low as possible.

[jimrtex]

Which is why a functional test is whether the protected group can choose their candidate of choice in the Democratic primary.  If the group you are protecting is Hispanic or Asian, then not only do you have to keep their CVAP high, you need to keep that of the BCVAP as low as possible.

And how is that supposed to work, exactly, when some voters are both black and Hispanic?  That is probably most salient in Charlie Rangel's current district, which has many black Hispanics from the Dominican Republic (though some might not be citizens).

NHBCVAP and HCVAP