How do we avoid results that look like districting was done to favor or discriminate against a political party?

Look for evidence of packing and cracking on the basis of previous election voting and registration patterns as well as income/persons per household. Also look for the total population of rural voters versus urban voters in county districts.

Nothing tells you more about how people in a geography will vote than how those in the geography voted in the last election. The next best data is how people are registered to vote.??

DRA 2020 a.k.a. Dave’s Redistricting is a web-based re-districting platform designed for use by people who do not have degrees in either math, geography, computer science, or political science to create re-districting maps. It is well designed and well stocked with American Community Survey (ACS) demographic and voter registration by, depending on the dataset, Census block or block group. The ACS 2019 file provides the most recent Census data on income and household makeup down to the census block group level.

It is no secret that those who receive public assistance tend to vote Democrat and those who pay high taxes tend to vote Republican. The ACS 2019 data at DRA 2020 will assist you in determining where each of those groups of people live throughout the US.

At the county and larger level, it’s also no secret that rural areas generally vote Republican while urban areas tend to vote Democrat. To see the urban versus rural distribution of geographies within districts visually, go to USgeocoder.com and:

Enter an address

When the map comes up, click on map layer and legend

Unclick landmarks and transportation

Click on the + at Political Districts

Click on the district you want to study, such as county

Click Urban Area. Urban areas turn dark grey

You can overlap the borders of Census Tracts to see how Rural and Urban match up on a more granular level.

Use DRA 2020 to build your proposed re-districting maps.?

Utilize their analytic tools to check for compactness and partisan lean.

Also, check to see if you’ve fragmented one party over multiple districts in such a way that members of that party never get above 45% of the population

Then check to see if the other party has maximized the number of districts it can be in with over 50% of the vote.

If you notice that by slightly moving the lines for districts you can change partisan lean, then, you are well on your way to becoming successful at political gerrymandering!?

To get even better at it, try splitting as many fairly compact clusters of voters in the opposition party between districts while pulling clusters of voters who vote for your party into districts. Soon, you’ll see you can change the competitiveness of a district with ease!?

However, if you want competitive elections and to comply with the California FAIRMAPS Act, you’ll need to avoid splitting populations of the voters who vote for the opposing party between adjacent districts that have large populations of your preferred voters. You also must avoid packing voters for the opposing party into supermajorities where they could just be majorities.