To the Honorable Roanne L. Mann,
The notes for submitting a proposed map say that I should include a message that provides any necessary "supporting explanations and legal arguments." I am not a lawyer, and I have no particular legal arguments or precedents in favor of my maps. I have only common sense. Which based on some of the other submissions I've seen is clearly not a requirement for offering input, although perhaps it should be. To that end, I am sending in a map that I've drawn up based on very specific criteria indeed: rationality, compactness, and geography, rather than partisan breakdown, incumbent locations, and party politics.
You will notice that I am only submitting congressional district maps for the ten congressional districts that are slated to sit north of the greater New York City area. Being a resident of upstate, I don't feel qualified to make suggestions for the division of downstate, which poses far more difficult dilemmas in terms of racial, ethnic, and cultural makeup. New York City's residents are capable of offering thoughts on their own borders; we up here can comment on our own. And someone clearly needs to comment, since the proposals so far submitted have been atrocious.
The level of gerrymandering present in the former district lines was quite bad enough, giving rise to the "earmuff" district 28, a district 22 which looks like someone just wasn't even trying to be subtle anymore, and other similarly awkward creations designed to keep certain people in power. And as bad as those are, many of the alternatives now being offered are even worse. Simply put, it would be hard to draw a less coherent set of congressional districts than what have currently been proposed, unless your method relied on a drunken monkey with a dartboard.
Even the map drawn by Common Cause, a reform group, strikes me as lacking basic common sense. Two districts in their upstate map are entirely enclosed by other districts, and one congressional district stretches at least two hundred miles from the edge of Niagara County in the west nearly to Utica. I've gone on road trips shorter than the length of that district.
This, your honor, is the point of my submission: to show that an individual, with no special training or expertise in demographics, can produce in the span of a few hours a map which makes more sense than these so-called legislators could given months of wrangling. It is not that hard--it's just that they aren't trying.
Wherever possible, I have drawn district lines to coincide with county borders. Where this isn't possible, or where a district spans multiple counties, I have grouped together areas with similar interests and spheres of influence. For instance, the Finger Lakes together with the eastern side of Rochester; the western side of Rochester with it's suburbs and areas along the Thruway and I-390 which are within the Rochester "sphere." Areas of the Southern Tier in two districts, one going with Binghamton, the other with Buffalo's southtowns.
The largest cities--Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany--are each split between two different congressional districts. In this way, each city recieves additional representation in Congress, having two members concerned with its issues instead of one. This also doubles as a means to balance each district; purely urban or purely rural districts would amount to incumbant protection schemes, with Democrats in cities and Republicans in the countryside.
The allowable variance from an even population split in a congressional district is 0.5%, or approximately 3,580. In this map, none of the outlined districts vary from the even split by more than 400 people, or 0.055%.
Each district is compact and self evident in it's layout; nowhere does the partisan breakdown define the shape of the districts, nor do they snake around "undesirable" people or areas. A representative shouldn't need airfare to travel from one end of their district to the other--it not only makes it more difficult for a non-incumbent to get elected, it does a great disservice to the people living on the "far" end from where their representative is, with attention paid to them being rare and thin.
In summation, your honor, it is my attempt to emulate what a set of congressional districts should be; a means to represent the people of a given area in the best way possible, for their own good rather than the good of the party controlling the legislature or the incumbents choosing their voters. I hope my efforts interest you, and I wish you the best of luck in sorting out what is by any measure the tangled morass of New York State politics.
Sincerely,
Adama W. D. Brown
