Politics Never Leaving Politics

First I want to preface this post by saying, "Yes, I am absolutely being a sore loser" But I believe I have a right to be one.

Old Dominion entered the Virginia Redistricting Competition. The past couple of posts have referenced the project and even showed the exact map we submitted for consideration in the competition.

I do not believe my fellow group members and I have reinvented bipartisan politics, made the most amazing and unquestionable maps and are above the opportunity for judgment and disagreement from onlookers. We have made a map, plain and simple, that has developed a change in the current representational strategy. In our map, as you can see on this very blog, we no longer have Charlottesville in the same district as a county touching the North Carolina border. We avoid the 3rd district's re-distributive leaps across the James River to make a minority-majority district according to the Voting Act. Our overarching ideas are that people who live east and west of each other in the state have more in common that those who live north and south of each other. I believe this idea is visually apparent. We stressed the ideas of naturally occurring  geographic boundaries, such as the James River. We followed that idea with man made boundaries, such as county lines and interstates, should be considered. We remained within the requirements of equipopulation by keeping each of our districts within 1% of the ideal number(727,366), which meant no district is more that 7,000 under or over the magic number (6,200 is our largest difference). Our districts remained as competitive as possible. We had 3 districts within the margin of error for elections, and 5 more of our districts were within the swing vote criteria. Basically 8 of the 11 districts we drew could be won by either party.

Most importantly, we remained consistent to the idea of place. We made maps that allowed counties, cities and even neighborhoods to remain intact, within any electoral cycle. An extreme emphasis was placed on the priority that neighbors voted for the same representation. We never went deeper than the census block level. The idea that two person's living next door to each other voting for different representatives was one we felt should be an automatic dis-qualifier.

This was not the case.

The map that won paid no attention to place. The map that won was a math equation, not a map. It was able to create an equal population down to 100 persons. But this meant it gave up any sense of place. The primary example to this is shown in its minority-majority district. Without showing the map, which I think would belligerantly unfair, I can tell you that to maintain contiguity in its minority district, the team cut a county along the northern most borders. Simply stated, in the district, if a person lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, they had a different Congressional representative than the person who lived at the front of the same cul-de-sac. The two persons live on the same named road, in the same town, in the same county. The children of these people go to the same elementary school, share the same public utilities, mayor, council, police and fire departments. Yet, the winning map decided that the two needed to be split on the most important representational scale, in order to allow for an equal and diversified ethnic population.

Gerrymandering is usually done to keep certain voices silent. The goal of the project was to show that everyone was able to have a voice. But to grossly gerrymander to create fairness is not fair either. It is still gerrymandering and should be treated as such. Yet, this is the map that won.

More than anything, I feel bad for all of the schools that put so much work into the project, to be ignored. Any school could have plugged information into ArcGIS and made an equation. If this was the competition's goal, it should have been stated. I feel the competition would have been ignored though, if the goals were stated as such. Many Virginia university students made good maps, but maps were simply not judged.

Congratulations to those who won.

Va. students tasked with crafting 'fair' voting districts

Posted to: Education News Norfolk Politics

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Doug Johnson, a political science major at Old Dominion University, is among students participating in the Virginia Redistricting Competition. "I live for this kind of stuff," he said.(Bill Tiernan | The Virginian-Pilot)

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VA. COMPETITION

Teams from 12 schools submitted plans based on data from the census. Winners’ ideas will be sent to the commission in charge of designing new districts.

By Bill Sizemore
The Virginian-Pilot
© March 13, 2011

NORFOLK

Dozens of bleary-eyed college students - many toiling over spring break - have been squinting at computer screens for weeks, meticulously drawing lines on electronic maps of Virginia.

They've been engaged in what cynics might consider a quixotic task: designing proposed legislative voting districts that are sensible, fair, competitive, and drawn with no intent to protect incumbent lawmakers.

There are cash prizes for the teams that draw the best maps. But the big question is: Will the General Assembly, which will create the new districts, pay any attention?

The students are not holding their breath.

For years, would-be government reformers have fretted that the decennial task of remapping voting districts - required by the Constitution to reflect population changes after every census - is a flawed process that inhibits democratic competition.

The problem has gotten worse in recent years, they say, thanks to increasingly sophisticated mapping software that allows lawmakers to design districts tailor-made to ensure their re-election.

In essence, legislators are choosing their voters - not the other way around.

After the last remapping of Virginia districts in 2001, more than 90 percent of the races for the state Senate and House of Delegates were non-competitive - meaning they were decided by margins of victory exceeding 55 percent, according to an analysis by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia.

Of the 100 House seats, 62 were completely uncontested.

In an effort to boost competition, some states have removed the responsibility for redistricting from the legislature and given it to an independent commission. Proposals for something similar in Virginia have gone nowhere in the Assembly.

Lawmakers are feeling some heat on the subject, however.

At a series of public hearings held last fall by the House and Senate redistricting committees, dozens of citizens begged legislators to turn the job over to an independent panel.

In January, Gov. Bob McDonnell appointed a bipartisan advisory commission to design proposed new districts. Its recommendations are due April 1.

That commission will receive the winning plans produced by the college competition, the first of its kind in the country.

The students had a long list of criteria to meet. They had to draw districts for the House of Delegates, state Senate and U.S. House of Representatives that are fair, competitive, compact, contiguous, nearly equal in population, respectful of city and county lines, and in compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act's requirements for adequate minority representation.

Nowhere on the list was protection of incumbent lawmakers.

"We're going to see a lot of maps that draw a lot of incumbents out of office," said Quentin Kidd, a professor at Christopher Newport University who helped organize the competition. "But they'll be more compact. They'll be respectful of existing political subdivisions. They'll accomplish all the other things that people say they want to accomplish with redistricting."

Kidd said the students are savvy enough to know that the districts finally adopted by the Assembly are likely to bear little resemblance to the college teams' maps.

"But the goal here is as much educational as anything," he said. "For the first time in the history of the commonwealth, the public will be able to see redistricting maps that were produced largely in the open without any sort of back-room dealing going on."

Thursday was the deadline for the student teams to submit their plans to the judges. Fifteen teams from 12 schools submitted entries. The winners will be announced later this month. The prizes could be as high as $2,000.

For many of the teams, including Old Dominion University's, the deadline fell during spring break.

Doug Johnson, ODU's team captain, was in the geographic information system lab in the Mills Godwin Building on Thursday, making final tweaks to the plan before submitting it.

Johnson, a junior from Suffolk, is a political science major who hopes to go to law school. He said he expects the team's plan won't carry much weight with lawmakers, but that's OK.

"I'm a poli sci major. I live for this kind of stuff," he said. "If they take away one good idea from it, then it was well worth doing."

Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com