Anybody got a quick list for me

[cinyc]

I'm pretty sure that Alaska has 2 state house districts wholly within the boundaries of each state senate district.  IIRC, there are 40 numbered house districts and 20 lettered senate districts.  House Districts 1 and 2 are in Senate District A, HDs 3 and 4 in SD B, etc.

Alaskan State Senate elections are every 4 years, House elections every 2 years in even-numbered years.

[cinyc]

Alaska The constitution requires that the 20 senate districts be comprised of two house districts.  It is not an absolute requirement that the senate districts be contiguous (only to the extent practicable).  SD A is barely contiguous, and it possible that HD 2 was drawn so as to provide contiguity with HD 1.  There are some other senate districts that are simply attached to each other (C and H for example).

The original Alaska constitution had vested redistricting authority in the governor, and had not based the senate entirely on population.  After the OMOV decisions, the governor simply started redistricting the senate based on population.  During this time, Alaska had multi-member house districts.  It was somewhat of an accident that the number of senators and representatives were in a 1:2 ratio.  The Alaska Constitution also provided for apportionment based on the civilian population, but after it found this impossible to do, simply started using the census population.

In 1992, voters created a redistricting board, and also codified actual practice by switching to the census population.  It also formalized the requirement that senate districts be comprised of two house districts.  It said that to the extent practicable, districts should have equal population.  After the first redistricting under the new constitutional amendment, the Alaska Supreme Court overturned some districts that were within the 10% limit for state legislative districts that is believed to be acceptable to the SCOTUS, saying that with modern mapping technology and census data, more equal district populations are possible to be practiced.

It is conceivable that the SCOTUS could at some time make a similar ruling, which would force the states to come up with some rational basis for any deviation.

In November 2010, voters rejected (by about a 40:60 margin) a proposed amendment that would have increased the legislature to 44 and 22 members.

HD1 and HD2 were drawn the way they were to put the "larger" Southeast Alaskan towns other than Juneau into the same Senate District, and put the more rural Southeast Alaskan villages in HD5, which then ends up in the same Senate District C as the very geographically large, very rural HD6 in interior Alaska.  Basically, it's an attempt to put communities of similar interest together in Senate Districts.

HD1 is basically Ketchikan, HD2 Sitka, Wrangell and Petersburg - the largest towns of Southeast Alaska not named Juneau.  Both are in SD A.  HD3 is urban Juneau; HD4 is suburban Juneau.  They make up in SD B.  It's the state capital and a government town.  HD5 is the really rural areas of Southeast Alaska, from Haines to Craig to Hyder. And HD 6 is bush interior Alaska - many areas of which are either on far-flung areas of the road network or entirely off of it.  They have more in common for a senate district than Ketchikan, Skagway or Juneau.

There are rational reasons for putting these areas together, especially in the Southeast.  Most Southeast towns are not connected by roads, and putting part of Petersburg in a district with Juneau just to balance population wouldn't make much sense.  You need a plane or ferry to get there from there.  Someone from Juneau probably wouldn't adequately represent Petersburg and vice versa.

A similar arguments can be made in Hawaii - that putting urban or even suburban Honolulu in a district with more rural Kauai just to balance population doesn't make much sense since you can't drive from Oahu to Kauai and their interests aren't even close to the same.

[cinyc]

The point is that in Alaska senate districts are comprised of two House districts rather than being subdivided into two house districts.

Senate district C would not have been drawn the way that it was if you drew the senate districts.  Neither would H, and A might not have been drawn exactly the way it was.

Instead you figure out how many House districts can be drawn in the panhandle, and realize that you can draw 5 if you include Cordova.  That's two for Juneau, one for Ketchikan, and two for everyone else.  You put Cordova, Haines, and Skagway in one district; and Wrangell and Petersburg in the other and play around to try to get the population balanced.  Afterward that you start pairing them up, and since you have an odd number of House districts you stick 5 and 6 together. 

The panhandle will likely be down to 4 house districts, you will still have 2 in Juneau and 1 in Ketchikan, but they will likely have to go outside the immediate areas to get enough population.  You have to pick and choose, and throw everything else into the 4 the district.

Alaska does not require senate districts to be contiguous.  And if HD-1 and HD-2 did not connect, they could still be placed in a common senate district.

I think that if you start drawing Senate districts from the Southeast, you'd end up with the same map as the House map.   When drawing the current map, the first order of business would be to keep Juneau together, which would necessitate putting Ketchikan, Sitka, Petersburg and Wrangell together, and leave you with a remainder.  The remainder has more in common with bush interior Alaska than any other territory in the rest of Alaska, so putting those areas together in the same Senate District makes sense.

I agree that the Southeast will likely be down to 4 districts, which will necessitate adding some areas to the Juneau district (Skagway/Haines/Gustavus being the most logical), and extending SD A further into the Southeast Bush.  How much of what's left of old HD5 remains in SD C will likely depend on the extent of population loss in the rest of Southeast Alaska.

[cinyc]

I think that if you were drawing senate districts first, you would have one in Juneau, one in Ketchikan-Wrangell-Petersburg, and then the Sitka-Haines-Skagway-Cordova district continues across to Valdez and the Kenai peninsula, and perhaps northward to the Alaska Highway

Perhaps.  But if you were to do that, Valdez or (depending on which part of the Kenai you include) Homer would end up being the largest town in the district, shifting the balance of power in the district from small village Alaska to middling towns.  While I haven't calculated the population of every HD 5 town, I'm guessing Valdez is at least double the size of the next closest town.  By attaching HD 5 and 6, you end up with a truly rural Senate district instead of two Senate districts that would likely be dominated by whatever mid-sized towns you put in them, due to greater voter registration and turnout.

By the way, the current SD C Senator is from Angoon in the Southeast.  His predecessor was from Rampart in Interior Alaska.   Given Southeast Alaska's likely loss of population, it will be interesting to see if they can even try to draw a seat to keep the sitting Senator in power.

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I didn't take race into account, but that would be another reason to attach HD5 to HD6 instead of diluting the Alaskan native population in both by attaching each to a more white district.

[cinyc]

In 2001 after the redistricting commission drew its plan there was a court challenge, and the Alaska Supreme Court overruled parts of the plan.  They ruled that HD 5 was not compact, but ordered it to be reviewed because it might qualify under the VRA.  The plaintiff's on that segment of the case were from Craig, which is in the tip of the tail of HD-5 as it wraps below Ketcihikan and heads north.  The plaintiffs had agreed that the inclusion of Cordova was required to get enough population (apparently there have been previous court cases that overturned placing Cordova with the panhandle), but the district did not need to go south of Baranoff Island (Sitka).  But a dissent noted that the alternative HD-2 would have included Petersburg and Wrangell, and then included an arm that split Haines borough so it could included Klukwan (NW of Haines).   So apparently, they were seeking to make that be the Tlingit opportunity district. 

Anyhow the redistricting commission made an affirmative finding that they were intending to create a VRA district, which overrode the compactness requirement of the Alaska constitution.  The dissent in the Supreme Court would have upheld HD-5 on socio-economic integration grounds (claiming that the constitution places that and compactness on equal footing).

Senate C might not qualify as a VRA district because it is not compact and combines Athabascans and Tlinglits.

HD-5 currently reaches to the eastern tip of Kenai, and it abuts the boundary of Valdez (Cordova is west of the dividing line between HD 6 and HD 12.  So if you were drawing a senate district, inclusion of Valdez would be trivial. 

Kenai has almost 3 house districts.  One is in the town of Kenai, and the other is in the immediate vicinity.  The other included Seward, Homer, and then jumps across Cook Inlet (I don't think there are many people there).  So between Valdez and Seward you may be getting close to enough population.

The Supreme Court also overturned the Anchorage districts, suggesting that they did not meet the population equality standard of the Alaska constitution (in effect, they said that there might not be the same 10% prima facie presumption of constitutionality, that the SCOTUS appears to have set down, at least in urban areas.

Thanks for the info.  Kenai Peninsula Borough actually includes quite a bit of the very sparsely populated area on the opposite side of Cook Inlet.  That's probably the reason that HD-35 extends across the inlet.  There's at least one small village on the other side of Cook Inlet within Kenai Peninsula Borough (Tyonek), but that's in HD-6.

Also, the areas of HD-5 that are on Kenai Peninsula are actually in the Valdez-Cordova Census Area, not Kenai Peninsula Borough itself.  The other area of the Valdez-Cordova Census Area that's not in HD-5 or Kenai Peninsula borough is the city of Whittier, which is closer to Anchorage (and its year-round port).  It is in HD-12 with Valdez.