How Can I Judge Redistricting Plans?

Absent obvious defects and biases, it can be difficult to judge a redistricting plan or to compare alternative plans. There is no one right answer, nor is there just one metric that can be used.

In many cases, better plans will be more closely balanced and more compact barring specific defects or conflicts with other redistricting principles.

Since no one single metric can fully rate a plan, it would be logical to use multiple objectives and criteria. Developing a plan that is fairest to all constituents is a reasonable goal but that of course is hard to measure.

Every time MORe is used for public access, an administrator will have a copy of MTR as it is used to set up the MORe application. MTR has many additional plan metrics and can be used to evaluate many more alternative plans. In particular, MTR also enables users to evaluate their plan in comparison to numerous randomly generated plan and potentially identify biases and areas for improvement. You might request that some of this additional analysis be performed and that interesting plans be published on the web for public access.

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