Will city’s new ward map be compact?

After more than nine months of meetings, Evanston’s Redistricting Committee is nearing the stage of producing one or more new maps to rebalance the boundaries of the city’s ward to equalize their population.

So far, in a series of ward-level meetings, the committee has focused on potential minor tweaks to boundary lines without addressing the one of the key goals established by the state legislature for the redistricting process — that wards be compact in shape.

Drawing odd-shaped district boundaries for anticipated electoral advantage has long been a political sport — gaining the popular name “gerrymandering” more than two centuries ago.

Evanston’s current ward map — while hardly featuring a full-blown gerrymander critter — scores poorly for compactness — getting just 50 of a possible 100 points for compactness in an online computer model used for drawing redistricting maps.

Compact districts also typically mean voters in a ward are more likely to have shared interests and will face shorter travel distances to their polling places — although compactness alone doesn’t guarantee that.

In a test to see whether a more compact map could be devised that would also meet other redistricting goals, Evanston Now experimented with the computer program and came up with several alternative maps.

Here’s one of them.

This example map scores 89 of the possible 100 points for compactness.

And while the existing map has wards differing in population by more than 20.41%, the example map has a population variation of just 1.88%

The existing map has three majority-minority wards with minority population levels that range from 59.52% to 67.50%

The example map has four majority-minority wards with minority population levels that range from 52.13% to 64.76%.

Creation of majority-minority districts has been seen as a key way to assure that minorities are able to win representation on governing bodies. However, at the federal level there are signs that voters increasingly are willing to cross racial lines in deciding who to vote for.

The example map meets the committee’s goal of keeping the homes of all incumbent alderpersons within the wards they currently represent.

And, while the existing ward map has three alders representing portions of downtown Evanston, the example map increases that to four alders.

It also largely maintains the practice of using prominent geographic boundaries — like the railroad tracks, the north shore channel and major streets — to form some ward boundaries.

Of course there are many other potential ways to achieve similar redistricting goals, and it will be interesting to see what the Redistricting Committee actually comes up with.

Any readers inclined to experiment with drawing their own ward boundary maps can sign up for a free account to use the Dave’s Redistricting software that was used in preparing this story.