Iowa-style Redistricting: Measuring Erosity

[traininthedistance]

I think there is a world of difference between "small counties" in Texas and New Jersey.  It's entirely reasonable to expect that in rural TX, county lines matter because everything (school districts, police forces, etc.) are based on them, and there's a lot of unincorporated area that's administered by no subdivision smaller than counties.  This isn't the case in an urban state like NJ, where everything is part of an incorporated municipality.

In general, county lines are probably going to be less important in urbanized areas where municipal lines, urbanization patterns, VRA concerns, etc. should take precedence.  But in rural areas, counties matter.  It's really an urban versus rural difference rather than large versus small- I mostly agree with the gist of jimrtex's argument (even if he does romanticize small towns somewhat), but I'd much rather see small Bristol County, RI split than large Sedgwick, KS, just for instance.

And of course, in some states there's a sufficiently low county-to-CD ratio that every district is going to have to split enough counties that it starts to just not matter anymore.  Arizona and New Jersey are probably the best examples.  (CT and MA would be too, except that counties are already meaningless up there.)

[traininthedistance]

Perhaps we are better off insisting on non-splitting of counties; rather setting overly tight population equality standards.  IIUC, you claim to be able to find the best trade-off between erosity and equality.  So why set an independent limit on equality.

Why not:

Because 18.3% deviation pretty blatantly spits in the face of "one man, one vote".  I could see going up to, say, 3 or so percent deviation in the name of keeping political and natural boundaries together (and no, counties are not the be-all and end-all of boundaries), but when you get to double-digit variation I would hope that gets recognized as obviously unfair in all quarters.