FL: Rereredistricting

[Torie]

I'm always fair and balanced - except when I'm not.

This is all a legal exercise here, following the cases, that weird Florida law, and that weird scoring system used in Florida, that gives you two penalty points for the first chop of a county, and one point for each additional chop, so more counties being multi chopped, in exchange for more counties not being chopped at all, gets you a better score, e.g., it's better to have one tri-chopped county, that two bi-chopped counties. Their erosity scoring also tends to favor more my kind of "artistic" map, with nice clean lines, and rectangles, more than Muon2's road cut system, and super penalties for macro chops into counties. So I am in my element here.

I don't think Florida has a count system.

"respects political boundaries" (paraphrase) is a subjective criteria. It may be that they are focusing on the number of chopped counties, and it happens that many of the larger counties are multi-chopped.

The do have a count system, that was used to compare maps, and Muon2 discerned this peculiar bias incentivizing multi chopping counties.

[muon2]

I'm always fair and balanced - except when I'm not.

This is all a legal exercise here, following the cases, that weird Florida law, and that weird scoring system used in Florida, that gives you two penalty points for the first chop of a county, and one point for each additional chop, so more counties being multi chopped, in exchange for more counties not being chopped at all, gets you a better score, e.g., it's better to have one tri-chopped county, that two bi-chopped counties. Their erosity scoring also tends to favor more my kind of "artistic" map, with nice clean lines, and rectangles, more than Muon2's road cut system, and super penalties for macro chops into counties. So I am in my element here.

I don't think Florida has a count system.

"respects political boundaries" (paraphrase) is a subjective criteria. It may be that they are focusing on the number of chopped counties, and it happens that many of the larger counties are multi-chopped.

According to the reports put out on the plans they do have a count system. They identify the number of counties that are split and then sum the number of districts over all split counties - ie they count fragments. Then they repeat the counting exercise for municipalities. The two counts are viewed separately from each other.

They sort of punt on erosity and instead compute something like 21 separate measures of compactness. It has the effect of forcing an "artistic" approach since anything else that heads towards a gerrymander should get flagged by at least one of the measures. Of course it's all fairly opaque to the public.

It is interesting to note that among the compactness measures are some related to driving time and distance. It's the first time I've seen those formally used by a state in their official analysis. It also marks a step towards my view of roads as the best tool to measure erosity.

[muon2]

Torie, as a side note, do you see FL 20 as required by the VRA? Set aside the present case and FL law. Are the black areas sufficiently contiguous by your usual standard?

[Torie]

Torie, as a side note, do you see FL 20 as required by the VRA? Set aside the present case and FL law. Are the black areas sufficiently contiguous by your usual standard?

1. Even if the black area around FL-20 were contiguous, the CD would not be required by the VRA since on my map (which pushes the black pop about to the max), it's only 45.5% BVAP. But yes, even if it were 50% BVAP, it's still not required because the black areas of Broward are geographically discrete from the black areas of Palm Beach County.

2. Moreover, I consider FL-20, just like FL-05 as it was drawn by the map makers, to probably be illegal under SCOTUS law. It's an erose racial gerrymander not done or needed for partisan reasons. SCOTUS law trumps Florida law. I guess I would have, if involved in the litigation, dumped on FL-20 too, and smoothed out the lines between the 3 CD's in play in Broward and Palm Beach ignoring race to max the map score just to stir the pot, threatening to file a federal lawsuit if my point of view were ignored.

And in the map below, FL-22 while now clearly legal under federal law, might well elect a black under Florida law as well (the black VAP must be at or very close to majority in a Dem primary, with the one extra chop and some additional erosity upping the BVAP from 33% to 36% (another chop plus more erosity might get it up to 37%, but I chose not to go there)), so this iteration is probably the way to go.



And this iteration gets the BVAP about up to the max, and I suppose one would need to go there probably under Florida law, if it's the difference between 50% BVAP in a Dem primary, versus less.

[jimrtex]

9/25/2015 Part 2

The first witness was Dr. Paul Liu (sp?), a professor at the University of Utah. The parties had agreed to forgo direct examination for expert witnesses so they could get out of town, instead depending on their submitted reports.

The judge read Dr. Liu's report during a recess before he testified.

Dr. Liu, had been hired to determine whether Black-Hispanic coalitions exist in South Florida. His answer is no. As a senate witness, his purpose was to show that if FL-26 becomes too Democratic, it will become non-functional for Hispanic voters.

Cross-examination was painful to watch as Dr. Liu's speech was heavily accented. The LWV lawyer is clearly from north Florida with a southern accent that gets kind of whiny when he is insinuating that a witness is not credible. His style appears to be geared towards a jury trial, where he could discredit an expert witness, by showing his apparent cluelessness about South Florida.

The next witness was Dr. Mario Mareno, who is probably Cuban, but was quite comfortable in English and in South Florida politics. But is pretty closely aligned with the Republican Party. He was enjoying himself fencing with LWV lawyer. His testimony was more anecdotal. He said the Florida Demoncrats had been recruiting Hispanic Democratic candidates, but that if the Democratic party became dominant in a district, they would dump them. It appears that the intent of CP-1 is to increase the number of Blacks in FL-26, so that Hispanic Democrats could elect "their" candidate of choice (this was what was attempted in TX-23 as well).

[jimrtex]

I'm always fair and balanced - except when I'm not.

This is all a legal exercise here, following the cases, that weird Florida law, and that weird scoring system used in Florida, that gives you two penalty points for the first chop of a county, and one point for each additional chop, so more counties being multi chopped, in exchange for more counties not being chopped at all, gets you a better score, e.g., it's better to have one tri-chopped county, that two bi-chopped counties. Their erosity scoring also tends to favor more my kind of "artistic" map, with nice clean lines, and rectangles, more than Muon2's road cut system, and super penalties for macro chops into counties. So I am in my element here.

I don't think Florida has a count system.

"respects political boundaries" (paraphrase) is a subjective criteria. It may be that they are focusing on the number of chopped counties, and it happens that many of the larger counties are multi-chopped.

According to the reports put out on the plans they do have a count system. They identify the number of counties that are split and then sum the number of districts over all split counties - ie they count fragments. Then they repeat the counting exercise for municipalities. The two counts are viewed separately from each other.

They sort of punt on erosity and instead compute something like 21 separate measures of compactness. It has the effect of forcing an "artistic" approach since anything else that heads towards a gerrymander should get flagged by at least one of the measures. Of course it's all fairly opaque to the public.

It is interesting to note that among the compactness measures are some related to driving time and distance. It's the first time I've seen those formally used by a state in their official analysis. It also marks a step towards my view of roads as the best tool to measure erosity.

That their redistricting software reports certain metrics, does not necessarily mean that they have a scoring system.

[muon2]

I'm always fair and balanced - except when I'm not.

This is all a legal exercise here, following the cases, that weird Florida law, and that weird scoring system used in Florida, that gives you two penalty points for the first chop of a county, and one point for each additional chop, so more counties being multi chopped, in exchange for more counties not being chopped at all, gets you a better score, e.g., it's better to have one tri-chopped county, that two bi-chopped counties. Their erosity scoring also tends to favor more my kind of "artistic" map, with nice clean lines, and rectangles, more than Muon2's road cut system, and super penalties for macro chops into counties. So I am in my element here.

I don't think Florida has a count system.

"respects political boundaries" (paraphrase) is a subjective criteria. It may be that they are focusing on the number of chopped counties, and it happens that many of the larger counties are multi-chopped.

According to the reports put out on the plans they do have a count system. They identify the number of counties that are split and then sum the number of districts over all split counties - ie they count fragments. Then they repeat the counting exercise for municipalities. The two counts are viewed separately from each other.

They sort of punt on erosity and instead compute something like 21 separate measures of compactness. It has the effect of forcing an "artistic" approach since anything else that heads towards a gerrymander should get flagged by at least one of the measures. Of course it's all fairly opaque to the public.

It is interesting to note that among the compactness measures are some related to driving time and distance. It's the first time I've seen those formally used by a state in their official analysis. It also marks a step towards my view of roads as the best tool to measure erosity.

That their redistricting software reports certain metrics, does not necessarily mean that they have a scoring system.

Comments that I read about the merits of the House vs Senate plans implied that those scores are their implementation of the vaguer language in the Con Amend.

[jimrtex]

9/25/2015 Part 3 (first two hours)

Completed testimonly of Dario Moreno.

Before the experts for the plaintiffs were called, the House attorney attempted to enter into the record depositions of the map drawers in prior efforts. The plaintiffs objected, and this was sustained. The fact they were demonstrably Democratic hacks in the past, did not mean that they would be so for this particular phase of the case.

The Romo plaintiffs mapdrawer was Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard professor of political science. His surname is Basque.

He was told to look at the house and senate plans, and draw his own. He redrew 21/22 into an inland/beach split. He said so because he thought that the pairing of Frankel and Deutch was a tier one violation because it disfavored an incumbent. He claimed it was OK to check the addresses of candidates because the SCOFLA had done so in the senate trial. But they had done so after the map had been submitted to them, to check for intent.

Ansolabehere did not communicate with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, but the attorneys for the Rome plaintiffs had. The Romo attorneys are from Perkins Coie, who also happen to be the lawyers for the Democratic Party. The addresses of the incumbents were supplied to Ansolabehere by Perkins Coie.

The other witness was Sen. Bill Galvano, who is Senate Majority Leader, and also chair of the senate redistricting committee. Interestingly, he was first elected in 2012, after the initial redistricting session. He had however been in the House from 2002-2010, when he was first term-limited.

He described the process, and the initial modification that the senate passed (9062). After the two houses disagreed and the legislature adjourned, Galvano had the senate redistricting staff draw what is 9066. He made an attempt to have the legislature come back in session, but that didn't happen.

9066 and 9071 differ in FL-9, FL-15, FL-16, and FL-17. A weakness of 9066 was that it was never considered by the senate or house.

The house attorney asked if reasonable persons could disagree, and Galvano said that he didn't know how reasonable they were, but they disagreed. The plaintiff's had no questions.

Incidentally, the special session to redistrict the Senate will begin on October 19. The map drawing will be recorded.

[Torie]

The Judge asked the lawyer for the Senate which of the Senate maps he preferred, and he had no preference. So that sort of implies that the Judge is not nixing Galvano's map out of the box merely because it was not passed by the Senate. It does have its attractive features.

[jimrtex]

The Judge asked the lawyer for the Senate which of the Senate maps he preferred, and he had no preference. So that sort of implies that the Judge is not nixing Galvano's map out of the box merely because it was not passed by the Senate. It does have its attractive features.

It is kind of tricky since the lawyer was actually involved in the redistricting process (he's the Senate's lawyer - not just the attorney representing the senate in the courts). The Senate never considered the Galvano map. So formally, 9062 is what the Senate proposed.

[Miles]

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[windjammer]

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What does that mean Miles?
Good news???

[Miles]

^ I haven't seen which of the maps it is, but all the plaintiff maps have FL-26 moving a few points to the left.

[Torie]

The Judge apparently accepted the House map, except for CD's 20-27, so the Dems get their more Dem Hispanic CD in South Florida, which would be hard for the Pubs to hold if anyone but the current incumbent was running for the Pubs. But she should hold it I would think.

Oh, it appears that the more Dem CD is FL-26, which if so, the Dems should pick up. So they should net two seats out of all of this. If the Pubs win FL-18 which is open, their total loss will be one, and they have an outside chance of picking up the now more Pub open Grayson seat if they get lucky, in which event it's a wash, and if they get really lucky, and hold the now more Dem FL-13, would actually pick up a seat. Odds are net they will lose 1-2 seats however net. I am not sure why the Judge picked the Dem map for the Hispanic seats, even if he did not believe the Dems would not nominate an Hispanic. The lines of the House map appear less erose to me. Granted, in my map, the lines are the least erose, but I digress.

[Miles]

They went with CP-1, Isbell looked at the specifics of it. Obama won the new CD-26 by 11.5%.

[Torie]

They went with CP-1, Isbell looked at the specifics of it. Obama won the new CD-26 by 11.5%.

Since that number is from 2012, that means a Dem PVI of 3.5%.  I have this hope that the Dems nominate a non-Hispanic, just to show the Judge was wrong on this one, and his ruling was legal error. Just because the Dem leadership would be wise to nominate an Hispanic, does not mean they will. They don't control how folks vote in the primaries. The ruling was legal error anyway, because the odds are certainly lower that an Hispanic will be elected, and that is what counts. The Dem Hispanics are way, way, below 50% in the Dem primary, so the more Dem, the more likely that a non Hispanic will get elected. It's just basic math. But SCOFLA is almost certainly not going to agree with me on this.

[Miles]

^ I'd be shocked if Annette Taddeo doesn't win the D primary.

[windjammer]

So, Democrats pick up:
-Jolly's district
-Curbelo's district
-Webster's district

Republican pick up:
-Graham's district
-And more likely than not Murphy's district?

Oh and, Mica's district has been carried by Obama and will be competitive when Mica will retire (or if he decided to run in an another district).

[TJ in Oregon]

Doesn't the VRA require that a Section 2 district must allow the minority group to elect the candidate of its choice if the area has racially polarized voting? Why would electing a Hispanic Democrat meet that requirement any more than if, say, a SC seat were hypothetically gerrymandered to be 50% black and still elect Tim Scott. Or is the Cuban population sufficiently Democratic and/or dilute that this rule doesn't apply?

[Torie]

Doesn't the VRA require that a Section 2 district must allow the minority group to elect the candidate of its choice if the area has racially polarized voting? Why would electing a Hispanic Democrat meet that requirement any more than if, say, a SC seat were hypothetically gerrymandered to be 50% black and still elect Tim Scott. Or is the Cuban population sufficiently Democratic and/or dilute that this rule doesn't apply?

The Judge did not believe the testimony of the Pub expert, that non Hispanic Dem voters do not vote for Hispanics in Dem primaries, absent a perceived need that that is the only way to win the seat. Beyond the VRA, under Florida law, there is more of a focus on likelihood of electing a minority, so conceivably it could violate Florida law and not Section 2. The odds are certainly lower of electing an Hispanic now. And if most of the Hispanic Dems are not Cuban, lower still, because it may be the case that non Cuban Dem Hispanics would have no problem voting for a non Hispanic Dem over a Pub Cuban. We shall see what happens. As I say, it would be good to test this all out by having the Dems nominate a non Hispanic. That would generate a lot of good data for the next case that comes up in Florida.

[Nyvin]

So it looks like the Dems will pick up FL-10, FL-13, and FL-26 in the next election, and potentially pick up FL-7 and FL-27 when the incumbents retire.

The GOP will pick up FL-2 and probably FL-18, but those seats were always fluke wins anyway.

I'm fairly certain FL-9 will stay Dem since the Puerto Rican population there is exploding (literally tens of thousands more each year...).

In the end it might only be 1 net seat initially....but the new map looks much more promising and fair than the old one, and the seats that the Dems hold will have actual Dem majorities in them rather than relying on cross over voters.  

Good changes overall!

[Nyvin]

I would treat Graham and probably also Murphy as flukes, in which case the original map was basically 18R/8D/1T going by PVI.  Now, we will have 16R/11D going by PVI or maybe even 15R/11D/1T with the new FL-07 being left of the current FL-18 and having been won twice by Obama.  Also, note that the 2 most marginal D-PVI districts, FL-09 and FL-26 are currently moving left at 100 mph.  In PVI terms, it looks like a big win for Democrats.

Wow,  I pretty much just double posted you, lol.   I didn't read yours before I posted mine though...

[Torie]

So it looks like the Dems will pick up FL-10, FL-13, and FL-26 in the next election, and potentially pick up FL-7 and FL-27 when the incumbents retire.

The GOP will pick up FL-2 and probably FL-18, but those seats were always fluke wins anyway.

I'm fairly certain FL-9 will stay Dem since the Puerto Rican population there is exploding (literally tens of thousands more each year...).

In the end it might only be 1 net seat initially....but the new map looks much more promising and fair than the old one, and the seats that the Dems hold will have actual Dem majorities in them rather than relying on cross over voters.  

Good changes overall!

There will be an entirely new map in 2022, and maybe a different case of characters on SCOFLA, and maybe better data on Hispanic voting habits to boot, as I noted above. I still think FL-05 and more likely than not, the black CD in Palm Beach-Froward are illegal under Federal law, but I digress. It's time for the next lawsuit!  A world without an ongoing lawsuit on redistricting, is a very boring world indeed. The more the merrier.

[Nyvin]

The new CD-26 is D+5 PVI using 2012 numbers,  there's no way Curbelo can win with that!

CD-9 is D+5 also,  and trending Dem fast...very likely Dems will hold that seat.

CD-5 is D+13, lol,   Brown was worried a Republican was going to win here, yeah, okay.

Here's a really good map of the new districts:

http://www.brianamos.com/cp1/

[Torie]

The new CD-26 is D+5 PVI using 2012 numbers,  there's no way Curbelo can win with that!

CD-9 is D+5 also,  and trending Dem fast...very likely Dems will hold that seat.

CD-5 is D+13, lol,   Brown was worried a Republican was going to win here, yeah, okay.

Here's a really good map of the new districts:

http://www.brianamos.com/cp1/

We shouldn't understate CD-22 going from D+3 to D+5.  The old configuration could easily have been D+1 by 2020.

Indeed. Why do you think the Dem oriented outfit went there? But then again, in 2022, there will be a new map, if not before, and we get do this all again. Granted, in my most perfect map, I make FL-22 or whatever the Frankel district is, safe Dem myself, and even more safe to the point of totally safe after I cease to append the black communities of Broward and Palm Beach, because I think it might well be a violation of SCOTUS law. The lines, worrying about all the little rules Muon2 created, with my little codicils, do what they do. Whatever will be, will be.