Map Across America Majority-Minority District Consideration Winner: Teddy Warner
The DistrictBuilder team knows that redistricting only gets better when more people are involved. We wanted to host Map Across America in order to engage with mappers and get folks participating in the redistricting process in a fun way. Since the first DistrictBuilder implementation in 2010, we have worked with academics, analysts, and other experts in this field to ensure the latest release of DistrictBuilder would be an effective, easy-to-use tool to draw legal maps. We are fortunate to partner with these subject matter experts and are thankful three of them agreed to judge the competition. The DistrictBuilder team is blown away by the many excellent maps that were submitted and happy to showcase Teddy Warner’s Illinois Senate map submission.
About Teddy Warner
Teddy Warner is a Ph.D. student in chemistry at MIT. He became interested in redistricting in 2018 when the map in Pennsylvania was reshaped to encourage partisan fairness. After taking a class on Redistricting and Representation in college at Carnegie Mellon University, he won a competition to draw a map for the Wisconsin Assembly by emphasizing partisan fairness. Outside of science and politics, Warner enjoys playing clarinet and skiing. You can find Teddy on Twitter @TeddyWarner4.
Judges Statement
This map is excellent in its achievement of maximizing majority-minority districts with minimal partisan lean. You can check out the metrics for Teddy’s map here.
Teddy’s Map Narrative
The most important criteria considered in drawing this map were minority representation and intact communities of interest. Of course, all legal requirements for this set of districts were followed. All districts are contiguous and have essentially equal population. Communities of interest were maintained where possible. Under this plan, only 18 counties are split. In the currently enacted plan, 37 are split; this map offers a major improvement to maintaining communities of interest. The voting rights act is followed under this plan. Nineteen districts are majority-minority. Most of these districts are in Cook County, but a few minority coalition districts were able to be drawn outside of Chicago. Under the current plan, 18 districts are majority-minority, with 4 majority Hispanic districts and 4 majority Black districts. In contrast, this proposed plan has 7 majority Black districts and 5 majority Hispanic districts. This improvement is due to a lesser degree of packing in Chicago’s south side. Partisan fairness is also maintained in this map as the average seat has a partisan lean of D+8, which is identical to the overall state. Finally, the districts are compact where possible, with an average Polsby-Popper value of 42%. This offers a major improvement over the currently enacted plan, with a compactness score of 24%. Overall, this map offers improvements to each desirable quality of a redistricting plan. To ensure a more fair representation to the people of Illinois, this map should be considered for adoption.
We’re thankful for the devoted mappers that have contributed over 50,000 maps to DistrictBuilder to date. Want to get more involved in the redistricting process and map your own future? Start drawing in DistrictBuilder today. Be sure to check out our other Map Across America winners!
