Fair Redistricting (PA aftermath)

[Kevinstat]

Behold, the Portland Perimeter (okay, more of a quadrant than a perimeter):



The background map didn't come through for me when I saved this view.  If someone wanted to re-create my map on DRA and post it here they could feel free (but you'd have to use the block group option rather than voting districts, which are putrid for Maine; hopefully they'll be better next time).  As of and according to the 2010 census, District 1 (blue) had 664,175 people (-5.5 people from the state average) and District 2 (green) had 664,186 people (+5.5).

[Kevinstat]

Behold, a variant of my "Portland Perimeter" plan that only divides one county, Oxford:



Pretend the "horses hoof" of the white area (the town of Gilead) is in blue and the rest of the white area is in green.  It would have came out even worse with the voting district option, as Milton Twp. just south of Rumford which is part of a block group with eastern Bethel (and I have both municipalities in District 1) is part of the same "voting district" as the white area which besides Gilead I have in District 2 (and Milton Twp. is dis-contiguous from the remainder of that "voting district").  As of and according to the 2010 census, District 1 (blue) had 664,138 people (-42.5 people from the state average) and District 2 (green) had 664,223 people (+42.5).

[Kevinstat]

Regarding Maine, I am not sure using towns is a very good idea. Many of the towns are defunct, although where the lines are drawn between CD's, in all probability the towns involved will have some governmental life to them. But even using block groups on the DRA rather than election districts (which are larger), the block groups do not necessarily match the town lines. For example, looking at the maps below, if I added the town of Sweden in Oxford county to the blue CD, I would get very close to exact population equality (Sweden has a population of 391). But I can't do that. There are two block groups that together cover Sweden and Lovell, but the line between the two block groups does not match the town line between Sweden and Lovell. Other block groups combine more than one town, as one can see with the block group that takes in Stow, South Oxford and Stoneham.

I use the 2010 voting districts option, not block groups. ME consolidates its voting districts across towns for polling efficiency. I believe that when towns are consolidated into a voting district the voting district consists only of whole towns so no chops are needed. In any case the panel has expressed less interest in exact equality as long is the maximum deviation is under 0.5%. So going from under 400 deviation to under 100 deviation may not carry much weight.

Maine conducts its elections by towns, except the unorganized towns, which are generally unorganized because there are no people to organize them.

The VTD's are what Maine submitted to the Census Bureau, and appear to be Senate-House intersections (they are relatively small because Maine has so many House districts). The numbers are of the form: sshhhi, where ss is the senate district, hhh is the house district, and i is an index.

The last digit is the County Commissioner district.  Also, these are the pre-2013 State House, State Senate and County Commissioner districts.  I find the block groups much better overall for Maine, but they have issues too, as has been shown.

I'm working with Amanda Rector, who's Maine's State Economist but also the "Governor's liaison" to the Census Bureau's Redistricting Data Program, to get better voting districts in the future (although most of our conversations so far have concerned census block lines as the Redistricting Data Program was in its Block Boundary Suggestion Project phase until last year).  Like each town with its own polling place being its own voting district, and also each ward in a city being its own voting district, like New Hampshire does now (their 2000 voting districts were as bad as or worse than Maine's, but they really improved in 2010).  Or perhaps the voting districts could be the intersections of the towns/city wards as well as the State House districts, State Senate districts and County Commissioner districts.  The Congressional district lines in Kennebec County haven't been voting district lines there (unless they're also one of the other three district lines), but if you had the borders of organized towns as voting district boundaries that would take care of the Congressional district lines anyway, with all the Congressional districts Maine has had in recent memory at least.

[Kevinstat]

Perhaps you could provide a link to where one finds all these town maps.

I'm sorry I didn't reply to this earlier.  You already seem to know about this directory of 2000 census-era maps of county subdivisions (which New England towns are often treated as by the Census Bureau) and places, although maybe the map of Oxford County towns I thought you posted was copied from someone else (I saw it in a post of yours and not in a quote box).  To get the 2010 census version, click on "Parent Directory" and then click on "GARM2010/", which takes you here.  You might not be able to be sure in all cases whether a line between two block groups or two voting districts follows a town line, but in most cases you'll get a pretty good idea if it lines up or not.

It just occurred to be as I was writing this that you might have been talking about, say, maps with the boundary between Albany Twp. and Mason Twp. in South Oxford UT.  For those boundaries, the most user thing I've found for Maine (although I haven't looked that hard) is the MaineDOT Public Map Viewer.  I sometimes think of Maine having two sets of sub-county municipal boundaries, the Census County Subdivisions and the DOT/DeLorme set (DeLorme being the former publisher of The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer).  They're mostly identical in actual towns, with the DOT/DeLorme "Minor Civil Divisions" being subsets of the Census County Subdivisions, but some of the County Subdivision boundaries cut across townships, and the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation, which is its own Census County Subdivision, has it's territory parceled out between surrounding towns in the DOT/DeLorme MCDs, and the Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation is treated as part of the town of Perry.  The Penobscot Reservation, which stretches as far as Medway where the Penobscot River branches (it's pretty much the territory in the river and the islands within), is divided in the DOT/DeLorme MCDs roughly along the main channel and along extensions of the town lines from off shore.  My current Maine Atlas (I've gone through a bunch, some of which I've drawn county lines (before they highlighted those), school district lines, congressional or legislative district lines, etc.), has the land territory in the reservations in pink, but it does the same for the non-reservation "Trust Territories" (I think that's what I've heard them called) that I think were purchased by the tribes as part of the Maine Indian Claims Act in the late 1970s.  The Passamaquoddy have some Trust Territory along the Quebec border just northeast of where U.S. Route 201 crosses it and becomes (Provincial?) Route 173, which I'm pretty sure is far west of historical Passamaquoddy land.

Anyway, I think you may find those links helpful.  You could also see some changes in the Census County Subdivisions between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, like the former town of Madrid becoming part of East Central Franklin UT (interestingly, it's in a different census tract from the remainder of East Central Franklin but the same one as West Central Franklin UT which the former town also shared a border with, albeit a smaller one).

Since at least the 1990s, and I think since the 1980s, legal descriptions of election district lines, in statutes, court rulings, what have you, have referenced the Census-defined units.