We have investigated two possible policies for the current redistricting cycle in North Carolina. Both policies respect the county cluster rule, respect one-person-one-vote, and prioritize compact districting plans. One of the policies preserves municipalities when redistricting and the other does not consider municipal preservation. This is in response to the North Carolina Joint Redistricting Committee’s criteria in which they state they “may” consider.
We use these policies to generate two probability distributions (i.e. we quantify preferences between redistricting plans), and we reveal the typical partisan behavior of non-partisan maps drawn according to these policies.
We outline our methods in this document.
We then reveal the expected partisan behavior of the State House and State Senate under a variety of historic elections.
The expected behavior may be compared with the enacted and proposed plans.
We have also released the underlying data used to construct our figures in the above document.
Greg Herschlag and Jonathan Mattingly
