Team Concerned Citizens for Democracy, Concerned Citizens for Democracy, Honorable Mention, Adult-East
About Concerned Citizens for Democracy: We are a nonpartisan, all-volunteer group of lawyers, technical analysts, and activists fighting to end gerrymandering in Pennsylvania. The team supported a lawsuit (Agre v. Wolf ), which exposed the extraordinary collection of partisan data that was used in 2011 to gerrymander Pennsylvania's congressional and state legislative districts with unprecedented precision. Our Draw The Lines map submission grew out of this work. About Team Captain Anne Hanna: I am a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech and a Philadelphia resident. I served as an expert data analyst for Agre v. Wolf and subsequent legal efforts. About Jan Swenson: I am a retired public school teacher and am now an activist for educational and social justice causes. About Brian Gordon: I am one of the lead attorneys in the federal anti-gerrymandering lawsuit Agre v. Wolf. About Lee Hachadoorian: I am an assistant professor of instruction in geography & urban studies at Temple University, where I specialize in geographic information systems, urban economic geography, urban inequality, census data analysis, and open source software. About Dan Loeb: I have a doctorate in math from MIT. I have researched the mathematics of voting. In 2011, I testified before the Joint Hearing of the PA House and Senate Committees on State Government, calling for the adoption of quantitative redistricting standards. About Jason Magidson: I have a doctorate and am a writer and social activist. About Rob Williams: I am an experienced executive in private sector new-business creation and federal technology policy development. I am currently an instructor in the management of innovation at Temple University's MBA program. About Raphael Rubin: I am a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's computer and information science PhD program, living in Philadelphia with my wife, teammate Anne Hanna.
Judges' Statement
This team of activists, academics and attorneys kept municipalities together, showing only 27 split counties. They also met their goals for compactness, contiguity and jurisdictional splits. It was technically a very strong map.
This team of activists, academics and attorneys kept municipalities together, showing only 27 split counties. They also met their goals for compactness, contiguity and jurisdictional splits. I was technically a very strong map.
Personal Statement:
A version of this map was submitted by Concerned Citizens for Democracy as a remedial proposal for the 2018 League of Women Voters vs. Pennsylvania Congressional redistricting lawsuit. The map exemplifies one simple, intuitive method by which the 2011 redistricters could easily have complied with the Pennsylvania Constitutional requirements for compactness, contiguity, population equality, and minimal county, municipal, and ward splits, using only data and computational capabilities then available.
As comparisons of the 2011 map with the electoral data used by its drafters show, those drafters completely neglected Constitutional requirements in pursuit of partisan advantage. Our map and methodology, along with the other 13 proposals and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's structurally comparable remedial map, demonstrate how easy it is to do better.
Our design priority was to show how good-faith compliance with Constitutional requirements rejects three key abusive practices used by the 2011 gerrymanderers to precisely segment territory for partisan advantage --- targeting of specific counties and large cities for excessive fragmentation, perfect tailoring of fragment boundaries to partisan data, and Frankensteinian combination of unrelated fragments into monstrous wholes. In addition, we emphasize avoidance of county and municipal splits, as this is a prospective, objectively quantifiable, and legally established way to define and defend communities of interest.
We offer the following exemplar approach to compliance with Constitutional requirements:
1) Create roughly equal-population districts from compact assemblages of whole counties. Select the fewest possible counties to divide to balance district populations.
2) Divide any selected county smaller than a district between exactly 2 districts. Form as many complete districts as possible inside each larger county and assign the remainder to one other district.
3) Divide each selected county by aggregating adjacent, undivided municipalities onto the boundary of a neighboring district, one ""layer"" at a time.
4) Handle any necessary municipal divisions similarly.
By this means, our submission to the Court achieved exact population equality while splitting only 15 counties between 2 districts and splitting only Philadelphia amongst 3 districts (2 majority-minority). 16 additional municipalities were split between 2 districts. Average Polsby-Popper compactness was 0.3635, and 6 districts were competitive. The Court's remedial map achieved similar statistics using apparently similar methods.
This contest's tract integrity requirement necessitated slight modifications. Additionally, relaxing population equality to +/-0.5% (as is more appropriate to the true precision of census data) enabled reductions in county splits (13) and municipal splits (3), with little effect on other statistics.