In late January, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court struck down the GOP’s congressional gerrymander shown at the top of this post for violating the state constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal” elections. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to block that ruling, Pennsylvania will have to redraw its districts for the 2018 election cycle. GOP legislators have until Feb. 9 to produce a map, but Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf has vowed to veto another partisan Republican gerrymander. With a stalemate therefore likely, the court itself would likely have to step in to draw nonpartisan districts itself, and it’s accepting submissions from the public by Feb. 15.
The court itself has ordered that districts be drawn to prioritize compactness and minimize the number of divided counties, cities, townships, wards, and precincts, except where necessary to achieve equal population. With the likelihood of court-drawn redistricting in mind, Daily Kos Elections has prepared two nonpartisan maps to submit to the court, which we’ll detail below.
But we’re interested to know how you would draw the lines if you could! Dave’s Redistricting App is a free online program you can use to draw your own redistricting maps (note: DRA relies on Microsoft Silverlight, which does not work with all browsers; see here for more information). Certain limitations in DRA make it difficult to perfectly equalize populations between districts, in accordance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” jurisprudence. (We’ve refined our proposals with GIS software to resolve this problem.) However, DRA can still be used to produce instructive maps, and we invite you to try your hand at redrawing the Keystone State.
Below are our two versions of a proposed nonpartisan Pennsylvania congressional map, which we drew without partisan considerations in mind. We have included our calculations of recent presidential and statewide elections for each district, as well as the citizen voting age population and educational attainment rates among the adult population, all of which we present below each map. We also included links to files you can upload to DRA or use in GIS programs so that you can play around with these maps yourself.
The main difference between these two plans is that the first map turns retiring Democratic Rep. Bob Brady’s 1st District majority black, while the second leaves it predominantly white.
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Click to enlarge
The second map splits two fewer counties, but it does not create a majority black 1st District.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
So fire up Dave's Redistricting App and post your own proposals in comments!
