US House Redistricting: Michigan

[Linus Van Pelt]

I looked this up, and the relevant text is as follows - all emphasis mine. Note that the word "reasonably" appears in the line about county splits, so there's a bit of wiggle room. Also, I don't understand the bolded (iii). Does it mean that if you have to split a county, you have to split the part of the country that's left over from the districts entirely within the county into even fractions?

(link: www.legislature.mi.gov/.../documents/.../mcl-Act-221-of-1999.pdf)

You must be logged in to read this quote.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Two black majority VAP districts remain possible even without any weird snakes or an extra cross into Macomb, so the Detroit pack is clearly VRA-incompatible. But you have to go much further afield than we have been expecting. I'm not sure what the GOP will decide to do about this. Two examples, without having calculated all the ramifications to the surrounding districts: first, you can now go way downriver and totally overwhelm Dingell's core territory if you want; the second uses the brown district to attack the Oakland Dems more. (I've just moved the brown northward on the second map, but if the unneeded Macomb crossover is allowed by the law, which I'm not sure about, then in the second map the blue might as well also go north instead of south given that you're leaving Dingell his district.)

[Linus Van Pelt]

I don't normally read Swing State Project, but I've started to look a little bit at some of their redistricting threads, and it seems to be the opinion over there that the Michigan law prohibits two districts from crossing over the same pair of counties. Notice that the current map does abide by this constraint - while there are lots of county splits that might seem unnecessary from a certain angle, there is no pair of counties which both have the same two districts in them.

Does anyone have any evidence as to whether this is how things are actually interpreted in Lansing? If it is, then contrary to what we have been assuming, you can't have two districts in both Wayne and Oakland, one for McCotter and one for Conyers or Clarke.

[Linus Van Pelt]

What do I see?

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_documents/mich_redistricting.pdf

Livingston County paired with Lansing.

Oakland County cut 5 ways.

Not even 1 district entirely within Wayne County.

Oakland to Macomb double cross.

What map is that?