Virginia 2020 County Projection Map

[Torie]

Yes, I agree that PNM's map is about the best one can do, to achieve his nefarious goals.

There does not appear to be a way to avoid the yellow CD traveling the entire length of the state, given the assorted and sundry "blockages."

I might revise my map to avoid a macrochop in Chesterfield County and in VA-02 to play Muon2's game (I will ignore Muon2's rule to the extent it exists of banning bridge chops, because I don't agree with it, except as a preference). It raises a public policy issue actually. In the real world, it is better when creating a black performing CD to take in immediately adjacent black hoods in an adjacent county, rather than have the CD take in disparate and far away black rural counties. Indeed, it raises the Kennedy issue when one does so, although it would probably pass muster based on the rationale of avoiding a county chop, particularly a macro-chop, and the rural counties are adjacent, and where there is not a nefarious purpose of gerrymandering away a white seat of a given party. If in fact avoiding a chop of Chesterfield served the purpose of creating another white CD for the party of the map drawers, the map would be more vulnerable. Which is what PNM's map does (well a swing CD), but I digress.  My revised map will not be doing that, so it should be less vulnerable.

[Gass3268]

If you have the 2020 population numbers for this plan (deviations are fine, too), I can do a comparison with my baseline plan on the muon metrics. For your chopped counties, I need to know the expected population in each fragment. You can assume that they are split in proportion to the fragments' populations in 2010. I'll ignore Fairfax since that requires knowledge of the county subdivisions populations, which I haven't projected. If we were doing this right we would have been using those lines as if they were county lines.

Unfortunately I don't think the voting wards exactly match up with that map.

[muon2]

Yes, I agree that PNM's map is about the best one can do, to achieve his nefarious goals.

There does not appear to be a way to avoid the yellow CD traveling the entire length of the state, given the assorted and sundry "blockages."

I might revise my map to avoid a macrochop in Chesterfield County and in VA-02 to play Muon2's game (I will ignore Muon2's rule to the extent it exists of banning bridge chops, because I don't agree with it, except as a preference). It raises a public policy issue actually. In the real world, it is better when creating a black performing CD to take in immediately adjacent black hoods in an adjacent county, rather than have the CD take in disparate and far away black rural counties. Indeed, it raises the Kennedy issue when one does so, although it would probably pass muster based on the rationale of avoiding a county chop, particularly a macro-chop, and the rural counties are adjacent, and where there is not a nefarious purpose of gerrymandering away a white seat of a given party. If in fact avoiding a chop of Chesterfield served the purpose of creating another white CD for the party of the map drawers, the map would be more vulnerable. Which is what PNM's map does (well a swing CD), but I digress.  My revised map will not be doing that, so it should be less vulnerable.

How many times do I have to say that bridge chops are no longer banned and haven't been for over a year? There may be an erosity penalty depending on the type of connection, but that applies to whole counties, too.

[muon2]

If you have the 2020 population numbers for this plan (deviations are fine, too), I can do a comparison with my baseline plan on the muon metrics. For your chopped counties, I need to know the expected population in each fragment. You can assume that they are split in proportion to the fragments' populations in 2010. I'll ignore Fairfax since that requires knowledge of the county subdivisions populations, which I haven't projected. If we were doing this right we would have been using those lines as if they were county lines.

Unfortunately I don't think the voting wards exactly match up with that map.

They don't always, but we looked at this and few years ago and concluded that VTDs that span the line could count as keeping communities whole. I just assume that they a split in such a way as to conform to the community boundaries.