Abstract
Independent districting commissions encourage public engagement in the districting process, helping to balance competing stakeholder interests within guardrails established by Federal and State laws. This chapter highlights three common concerns: avoiding minority vote dilution, preserving communities of interest, and drawing reasonably compact lines. It recounts the public process through which the City of Waterbury, CT agreed upon and enacted a new five-district city aldermanic districting plan in 2015. Successive public commission meetings over several months accommodated a lengthy process of negotiation among citizen groups with different agendas. The outcome was a unanimously agreed-upon plan that addressed the above three concerns.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
These aldermanic districts did not need to be exactly equal in total population. Many courts have allowed districting plans with a total deviation from ideal as large as +10%. A plan’s deviation from ideal is measured by taking the absolute difference between the number of persons in the least populous district and in the most populous district and dividing that number by the ideal district size. For the City of Waterbury, this meant that the difference between the least and most populous district should not exceed 2207 persons (10% of the ideal district population). For the adopted plan, this difference is 2175 (calculated as 23,196 minus 21,021).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Morrison, P.A., Bryan, T.M. (2019). Public Involvement in Balancing Traditional Districting Criteria. In: Redistricting: A Manual for Analysts, Practitioners, and Citizens. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15827-9_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15827-9_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15826-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15827-9
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)