This is NOT what democracy looks like!

[angledge]

Ha ha! Data processing is finally finished for the 108th Congressional district map of Pennsylvania. 480,979 census blocks, sorted into 19 Congressional districts. Now that my data is in place, time to start getting the algorithms running ....




Here's a GIF, created in MS Paint from a TIFF exported from ArcMap.


Here's a PNG, created in MS Paint from a TIFF exported from ArcMap.

Comments

Re: just for local interest

[krick.livejournal.com]

Do the boandary lines follow rivers or roads? That might explain some of the strangeness.

Re: just for local interest

[krick.livejournal.com]

It just occurred to me that they might be following zip code boundaries.

In auto insurance, the whole state is divided into "territories" that are gerrymandered by the insurance industry to group highest risk areas together. In Pennsylvania, this results in things like this description of what comprises territory 01:



It's almost impossible to know what territory you live in. Imagine you were planning to buy a house and wanted to live in one of the "cheaper" territories. Good luck.

In California and a few other states, the people got fed up with this crap and made them change it all to a zipcode based system. As a result, boundary lines are a bit jagged.

Re: just for local interest

[angledge.livejournal.com]

The lines generally follow the boundaries of the census blocks. But they do so with discretion - after all, there are 480,000+ blocks & only 19 Congressional districts. So, which blocks get placed into which Congressional districts? That's the heart of the gerrymandering exercise. Gerrymanders use Census data & GIS software to tailor-make districts with certain characteristics - they use data such as previous voting results, party registration lists, even stuff like magazine subscriptions to guess how many Democratic/Republican voters live in each Census block. Then they group together Census blocks to give their party the competitive advantage.