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I live in North Carolina. As many of you know we have had a major problem with gerrymandering both for state and federal districts. For purposes of this question, I am only concerned about state districts.

My proposed solution is to model the federal system and use the nonpartisan districts we already have - our 100 counties. The NC Senate would be easy. Just up the NC Senate to 100 members, and give each county 1 State Senator. However, the NC House would be more complicated. The US House uses the Equal Proportions method to decide how to divide up the 435 static US House seats:

https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/congressional-apportionment/about/computing.html

My question is that if we assume each of NC's 100 counties gets at least one NC House member, what is the smallest total number of NC House seats that would be necessary in order to make it somewhat fair? Certainly if it would require 870 members, this might be unworkable. As you can tell some of our larger counties are way larger than our smaller ones:

http://www.us-places.com/North-Carolina/population-by-County.htm

If there is mathematical way to figure out the optimum number of NC House seats under my proposal, I would appreciate hearing it.

David P
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  • Why start from scratch rather than with something like http://autoredistrict.org/ which already has thought put into it? – btilly Jun 20 '17 at 17:24
  • Even these guys realize there is unintentional Gerrymandering. The supposed "solution" seems to use election data when drawing districts to get an even split. But of course this isn't fair to third parties. My idea is to get rid of districting altogether and just use counties. – David P Jun 20 '17 at 17:48
  • As soon as you are assigning seats to counties, how do you draw districts within counties? Now you're back to the possibility of gerrymandering! Worse yet, heavily populated counties tend to be cities that lean left, while lightly populated counties tend to be countryside that leans right, so counties are not exactly non-partisan. – btilly Jun 20 '17 at 18:22
  • The entire voting population of the county would vote for all the NC House representatives for the county. No districts needed. – David P Jun 20 '17 at 19:59
  • Well then, what do you consider "fair"? According to a quick simplified program, if you have 516 representatives, then the smallest counties have 5x representation. And that extra representation is in overwhelmingly rural, Republican counties. If you want them only to have 3x representation, you'll need 831 representatives. – btilly Jun 20 '17 at 23:32
  • Just write a program and keep running it until you like the results. – btilly Jun 20 '17 at 23:34

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