The Texas State Legislature released a Republican gerrymander plan in April (found here that was immediately critized in the liberal blogosphere for being in violation of the Voting Rights Act, unfair and ridiculously shaped, cracking Austin in something like five districts.
I want to present here how a plan could look that could have been drawn by a nominally independent, but basically partisan Republican commission that follows these guidelines:
*I'm not looking at incumbent's residences or the current districts.
*I'm drawing more VRA seats than the current map does.
*I generally try to avoid cracking cities that could be kept within one Congressional District.
*No completely ugly, NC-12 style lines
* I reject Fajita stripping. Come on, there are like two million Hispanics in South Texas with a density of 90+% Hispanics in basically every precinct. It's ridiculous to split that community in a billion parts just to avoid "packing" Hispanics. That's shameful if it's done intentionally, but if you'd have to draw a map that looks like a LSD-painting to avoid it, then you should just draw a district with Hispanic percentage in the high 80s.
*More on a meta-level I also want to use this diary to present how much you can actually read out of the Dave's Redistricting App files automatically if you know your way with Excel. Nothing here, except for the commentary of course, was calculated manually or even specifically for this state.
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