One Person,One District: A Democratically Derived Standard of Maximum Disproportionality

Abstract

Proposed national Congressional redistricting reforms have yet to include a definitive ceiling of maximum disproportionality that accounts for state-to-state differences in partisan clustering. This work proposes a precise disproportionality standard derived from equally valuing each person’s ideal of being centered in a compact district, thus directly incorporating the fundamental principles of one-person-one-vote and optimal representation into the standard. This spatial method also readily creates compact minority opportunity districts when necessary for Voting Rights Act compliance. The method’s partisan seat expectations for post-2020 Congressional maps of the 22 most populous states agree very well with the results of a leading ensemble analysis. Additionally, a cubic votes-to-seats model with a modest Republican bias is shown to provide a good fit across the 22 states’ expected partisan seat splits. The competitiveness and compactness of enacted maps are found to be generally below but correlated to neutral-draw expectations.