The independent commission that is drawing the state’s political boundaries for Congressional, BOE, State Senate and State Assembly Districts is only weeks away from publishing its first pass at new districts. This is part of the decennial process of redistricting, meant to ensure that all of the districts contain roughly the same number of citizens (of course to some interests, it is a time to make sure that districts are still drawn to produce specific political outcomes, such as electing people of a particular ethnicity).

Anyways, at this final stage, various groups are submitting “suggested” maps for the commission to consider — maps containing districts that their authors believe comply with all of the necessary mandates placed on the commission by the voters that created it, and that also are in compliance with the various court orders that pertain to the redistricting process.

One such interest group, the California Institute for Jobs, Economy, and Education (which is “code” for the California big-business community), has submitted their maps.  Laboring (for God knows how long) to actually crunch the data and produce the maps were Matt Rexroad (a member of the FR blog team) and Chandra Sharma over at Meridian Pacific.

Thanks to our friends at the Rose Institute, this group’s submission is available for you to peruse. When I say that, I mean that it is available in a format for you to literally zip around the state looking at all of the proposed boundaries. In fact, it is so detailed that you can zoom in down to a city block if you so desire.

Some broader observations about this particular set of maps…

• It has less population deviation for legislative seats than any other map presented.
• It complies with the voting rights act in a reasonable way without a bunch of districts that would not be considered compact.
• This plan nests Assembly and Senate seats (which is required, but not all maps submitted comply).
• Has 32 seats in the Assembly are likely Republican with 3 seats in play — 24 seats in Congress are in play.
• It does not take the homes of current members into account (as required) so some get lumped together,
• It seems to devide fewer cities than any other plan I’ve seen.
• It keeps some level of sanity in the Inland Empire where other plans are all over the place.

OK, with out any further introduction, click here to go to where the Rose Institute has uploaded the maps, and spent your weekend playing with it — it’s addicting…

UPDATE:  Getting some confused readers.  When you pull up the link, you’ll need to go to the “Layers” menu that is on the map —  click on the >> arrows next to Congressional, Senate or Assembly and click on the maps you want to see.  The ones that come up as a default were the maps submitted by MALDEF.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2011 at 10:31 am and is filed under Blog Posts.