[EM] Redistricting, now with racial demographics

[Raph Frank]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Brian Olson<bql at bolson.org> wrote:
> As this isn't something I really want it's going to be hard to get motivated
> to work it out.
> That said I think the way to go about it is to make unbiased districts by my
> current district, then pick one district with the highest proportion of the
> desired minority to elevate and adjust all the districts until that one has
> a majority of the desired minority. Repeat one district at a time until
> there are enough (some states require two or three I think).

You could change the official rule to add a condition so that only
maps that meet minority majority distracting requirements (say 55%)
are considered valid.

The eliminates the post processing required.  You pick the "best" map
such that it has less than 1% population imbalance and has at least a
55% majority for each "designated minority" district.

Even with a PR method the VRA could apply.  For example, if there was
10 seats and 2 districts, and an ethnic group had 10% of the
population, then you could prevent them from achieving a seat by
splitting them so that they are evenly split between each district.

This would give them 10% in each district, which isn't enough to reach
the quota.

So, a rule that boundaries should not split communities of interest
would still be a reasonable rule.