I was thinking of doing a timeline in which Nixon refuses to resign and instead there was Constitutional change to dilute the presidency, ushering in a US Parliament. Anyway, I probably won't write it, but I've been using Dave's application and combined it with the suggestion from the cube root rule thread that the US would have 675 seats (and decided to give DC one of the 675 seats). I'm thinking I might turn it into a PM4E scenario. I can show you some of the maps I've drawn if anyone's interested. Since I don't like gerrymandering (and don't know internal state voting patterns anyway) I'm focusing predominantly on population equality with a secondary intention of not dividing counties (although that's more the case in some states than others), and I'm ignoring the VRA (since it's a scenario and since it's PM4E and elections rather than the more serious consequences of governance and minority representation). Anyway, if you're interested in seeing some of the maps I've drawn and perhaps guessing how they'd vote, I could start a new thread (so as to not clutter this one).
It sounds like an interesting project. A new thread would probably work best. However, I'm not sure if it fits better on the Elections What If board or better here. In any case if you are looking for advice, you should also define how close in population equality districts must be and what county splitting rules would be in effect. Since this happened after the 1960's I would expect the VRA to still apply.
Yeah - I was going to put it on Elections What-If and then I was thinking, since it's based on changes to the structure of the elections, maybe it would belong better on Alternate History, or perhaps, since I'm thinking of making it a bit of a PM4E scenario, putting it on the Election Games thread. I'll probably go with Elections What-If, though.
Fair enough - I'll go with the VRA. The only Southern State I've done so far is Arkansas, so I don't think it will change anything I've already done, anyway. I might actually go back and re-do some of the ones I've done because I've been keeping the population to a difference of less than 1,500 voters (while Electorates contain around 440,000 voters), so the margin for error is probably smaller than necessary and a larger margin for error would lead to fewer county splits. Generally, I've tried to keep cities together because I think there is more likely to be a "community of interest" keeping a city in a single district (or combining a couple of cities together) and keeping rural areas in a state in a separate district, rather than combining rural and city areas in a single district. In other words, not like Regina in Saskatchewin (
https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=98141.msg2069872#msg2069872), where the city is divided across about four different ridings and each is combined with a large rural area. I'll start that new thread soon, and I think I'll go with the Elections What-If board.
