Make your own congressional maps!

[Bamspeedy]

Draw your own congressional district maps!
Make a FAIR map or gerrymander to your heart's content!

https://districtr.org/new

Did one of Wisconsin, not that much different than the real, current one.
https://districtr.org/plan/103059
(not ideal on cell phone, may take long time to load all data and hard to see map, best is view on laptop or desktop).

Tried to stay with county lines (an optional overlay on second tab), but obviously to get populations evened out at end had to cross county lines in a few places. Interesting when I come across a single family house marked off as it's own area to be assigned to a district......

Annoying how many times a city overlaps the border of two counties (or more!). So I'd like to hear some thoughts: Try to keep a city 'together' in same district, or cut it in half if that is where the county line lies?

I challenge anyone to make a Wisconsin map that gives democrats an advantage!

 

[amadeus]

 

[Gori the Grey]

I saw a report that said gerrymandering really took off when computers could be recruited to draw districts advantageous to one party or the other. Could draw a district line down a particular street if more Dems lived on one side and more Reps on the other.

I think we should flip this around. We should tell the computer to make districts as close to 50-50 as it is possible to construct.

Alternately, I think there should just be a limited to how many lines can be used in the drawing of a district, how many sides on the resulting shape--as few as possible.

 

[Samson]

I saw a report that said gerrymandering really took off when computers could be recruited to draw districts advantageous to one party or the other. Could draw a district line down a particular street if more Dems lived on one side and more Reps on the other.

I think we should flip this around. We should tell the computer to make districts as close to 50-50 as it is possible to construct.

Alternately, I think there should just be a limited to how many lines can be used in the drawing of a district, how many sides on the resulting shape--as few as possible.

I am not sure what the aims are, but we clearly should draw the lines by some algorithm designed to produce whatever optimal property we as an electorate desire.

 

[Bamspeedy]

So Milwaukee County is too populated for one district. It has to be split, but how? Southern (or Northern or Western) part of it given to another district? Split up and spread out over multiple districts? (In my map south milwaukee was given to the district that contains Kenosha, rest of Milwaukee county stayed together.)

If you have the stereotypical city center and the surrounding suburbs, do you split the city in the middle so each district has an equal share of the city center and suburbs, or you give one district the city center and the other district the suburbs? Population wise might not be 50/50 between urban and suburban so one could drown out the other.

In Wisconsin, republicans have more seats even though the total vote counts are close to 50/50. Some of that is indeed from gerrymandering, but also because democrats are heavily concentrated in Milwaukee and Madison. The democrats in other cities in Wisconsin apart from those two areas get outnumbered by all republicans in the small towns and rural areas surrounding them. So statewide the vote is close, but drawing maps to reflect that is hard.

Illinois 2022 congressional map is an example of democrats (instead of republicans) gerrymandering as they tried to group the smaller cities together (Springfield, Champaign, and the urban area on the border with St. Louis) creating a snake across the middle of the state, so those smaller democrat cities aren't drowned out by the rural folk around them.

IMO, All parts of a district should be as close geographically to each other as possible. Squarish shape rather than a squiggly line or a stick.

 

[Broken_Erika]

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