As I noted ealier, I wanted a baseline to compare the current WA assembly with the potential advantage of split districts. The starting point was to draw revised legislative districts according to neutral rules. I started with this set of whole county regions with each region containing a whole number of districts. Districts here are required to be within 5% of the population quota, though the actual districts are much closer in population.
To complete the test of nesting districts on the WA partisan balance I created a plan of 98 House districts based on the 49 LDs in my previous post (similar colors show the nested pairs).
I know you came up with the multi-county groupings for the Senate and not for the House directly, but it would be interesting to see the resulting county groupings for the House. It's pretty clear, for example, that Asotin and Whitman counties together form a 1 as do Garfield, Columbia and Walla Walla together. But are there any 3s, 5s, 7s, etc.? (These could cover multiple counties, just not the entire Senate grouping as that would obviously result in an even number of House districts.) At first I thought Benton County might be a 3 and Franklin and Adams counties a 1, but looking closer it's clear that the Richland district crosses over in to Franklin County to include area between Richland and Pasco if not Pasco itself. It might be close to a 50-50 split between Benton and Franklin counties in fact.
Also, as a Senate (and House) district crosses the King County-Snohomish County boundary, shouldn't the 9 and the 14 be a 23? Or did you give yourself flexibility to cross the borders of your groupings when it came time to divide those groupings into Senate districts? Either way, a second Senate "base map" showing the actual resulting groupings (so a 23 in the grouping including Seattle, which looks like it would be one 42 in the House map) would also be nice.
