I contest the presumptions made by a few posters that splitting large counties is preferable to splitting small counties. In fact, I am generally of the view that splitting small counties is nearly always preferable to splitting large counties. If we take counties seriously at all (a debatable concept), we have to assume that all residents in the county have some sense of commonality not shared with residents of other counties. Taking that assumption, splitting a large county destroys the links between more people than splitting a small county does. I would much rather 10,000 people in a small county feel displaced than 200,000 people in a medium-to-large county feel the same way.
The voters in the small county will be even more ignored than they are now. The district offices could be 100s of miles away - in opposite directions. The representatives are unlikely to have the editor of the Faraway Falls Farmer-Mimeograph on speed dial.
In larger counties, the office may still be in the county. The representative is going to pay attention to his constituents, as well as those in the adjacent districts.
Administration of elections will be harder for the small county, as they will need more ballot faces. The larger county already is set up to handle this.'
First off, this is an absurd romanticism of small towns, and it is therefore frankly shameful as a justification for policy. However, I will take your assumptions about small counties for granted.
You are ignoring that the ostensibly lesser harm to large counties is spread across a much larger number of people. I don't care about counties
qua counties; they don't have feelings. I am concerned about the impact a county split has on individuals. Even assuming that the harm to individual persons from a county split is greater in a small county than in a large one, there are a lot more people in a large county by definition. Thus, that lesser harm is experienced by a much larger group of people. At best, it is debatable whether one harm is overall larger than the other. Even if the harm from splitting a county to individuals in a county of 10,000 is ten times the harm from splitting their county to individuals in a county of 100,000, the aggregate harm is equal. And that's still assuming that the difference is as comically large as you paint it.
True, but irrelevant.
Er... No, I'm not? I never said anything about splitting counties being inherently good. I don't even believe that.
I do, however, believe that splitting counties is sometimes superior to not splitting counties, though that is irrelevant to my previous point (and my previous point starts from the assumption that splitting counties is bad). Counties frequently do not represent communities of interest; they were, after all, drawn many decades or centuries ago in contours of terrain and population that are, in nearly all cases, irrelevant to modern society. In some places, counties have preserved their coherence, but many counties are incoherent blobs with no uniting force. And this is true of small counties as much as large; since we're discussing Washington State, take Adams County as a prime example of an incoherent county.
There are other viable reasons for splitting a county as well, for example if not splitting a county requires extremely oddly shaped districts. That is, it may be that each individual county is internally coherent, but by preventing county splitting, you are forced to draw districts that do not follow communities of interest. (A good example of this is the current West Virginia map, though there the ridiculous bacon strips are not actually necessary to avoid county splits.)
Thus, splitting counties is only a necessary evil in the sense that it is evil that counties are not instead rearranged to match communities of interest (or when population equality requirements mandate a split of a county that happens to represent a community of interest).
