US House Redistricting: North Carolina

[TTS1996]

This is a quick attempt (a couple of hours or so) to do NC using British redistricting rules adapted to the US, along the lines of the following:

a) Don’t cross county borders unless you need to (it took me a while to work out precinct cross city borders in the US, how odd!) - but, don't be afraid to cross county borders if the alternative is "whole counties, but a gerrymander"
b) Try to obey physical features and local communities of interest
c) No splitting small towns (ie <300,000) if a district can be based on them. I may have ended up splitting villages/small towns because precincts cross them - really, precincting seems very odd in the rural/small town areas
d) Electorate as near to state-wide mean as it can be – but not stupid levels as it is in the US. A 2% deviation from the mean is perfectly acceptable. In Britain 5 or 10% from the county mean would not be considered awful if there were physical features in the way. I've tried to limit the differences.
e) Notional electoral results, and the homes of incumbents, can take no place in redistricting and these are to be ignored ruthlessly, insofar as one can ruthlessly ignore something.
f) The VRA doesn’t exist, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that just because two people share the same colour skin doesn’t mean they have any community of interest at all.
g) Overriding rule: take none of the above rules in extremis at the expense of the others, if to do so comes up with something that looks gerrymandered (in fact I’ve not been able to avoid this – if only because through non-American eyes a straight line in legislative redistricting does simply look gerrymandered – but hopefully nothing has been done deliberately).

I often think, when discussion of US redistricting reform comes up, that rule (g) is what gets ignored. It would be possible to come up with a gerrymander with fewer county splits than I have below, but it would still be a gerrymander if the other rules get ignored.

Anyway here it is. I have no real knowledge of the US or of NC so please pull it apart.

s7 (dot) postimg (dot) org/4s9vmugux/NC1 (dot) jpg

(I can’t post images yet) fixed by the moderator; and now the image is gone

My one issue is that Charlotte is too big to draw a core district in, much as I tried to have (and this is very British) “Charlotte within the ring road” as a district. Really I should have had Charlotte East and Charlotte West (or North and South), and included the suburbs.


EDIT: perhaps an addendum to the rules above: a district is not contiguous if contiguous by a stretch of water. Because it isn't! I can understand why Staten Island has to share a district with Brooklyn and that's an exception, but in NC it's not necessary.

[TTS1996]

Otherwise, sounds good, although I can't see your image.

s7 (dot) postimg (dot) org/gu59gzq3d/NC1 (dot) jpg

Hope this is visible.

Anyway, I think it better than the NC State Legislature's attempt.

Moderator's note: the image has a different url when I link. I've put that in the image, but I'll see if this lasts.

[TTS1996]

f) The VRA doesn’t exist, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that just because two people share the same colour skin doesn’t mean they have any community of interest at all.

The basic idea behind the VRA, particularly in NC and other Southern states is to assure that minorities aren't gerrymandered out of power. This is particularly important in the south because you often see racial block voting- whites voting overwhelmingly for Republicans (and vice-versa). In some parts of Mississippi, you can draw a 54% White, 45% black district that's pretty much safe R. Thus, blacks can be pretty easily disenfranchised.

Of course, in NC, it isn't that polarized, but there is definitely racial block voting.

Now, I do agree that a black majority district isn't necessary in NC. But NC-1 should probably be plurality black and whatever district is based in Charlotte should not have any racial group as a majority.

There may be bloc voting, but all the VRA seems to achieve - from a Western European perspective - is the ability of Republicans to gerrymander majority-minority districts that vote 70, 80, 90% Democrat, and almost take a gleeful pleasure in it, because the courts force them to do so.

On this side we don't have these issues. There are safe, 99% white, Conservative constituencies in Britain where the central party have arranged it for BME (minority) candidates to run for the candidacy, the candidate has been selected by the party members, the candidate has then been elected (see North West Cambridgeshire or Stratford-upon-Avon) and no-one blinks an eyelid, because the content of the candidate's character (or perhaps the colour of his rosette) was more important than the colour of his skin.

No, no - this whole apparatus should go. If there was an impartial redistricting commission, concerns that minorites would be gerrymandered out of power would be moot.