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.