2020 Rhode Island Congressional Districts

[mzwu]

Redistricting requirements

In Rhode Island, according to the Rhode Island Laws, Chapter 100, Section 2 districts must:

1. be contiguous
2. have equal populations
3. be geographically compact
4. preserve state senate district boundaries as much as possible

Interpretation of requirements

We enforce a maximum population deviation of 0.5%. We add a VRA constraint targeting one minority opportunity district.

Data Sources

Data for Rhode Island comes from the ALARM Project's 2020 Redistricting Data Files. Data for the 2022 Rhode Island enacted congressional map comes from the American Redistricting Project.

Pre-processing Notes

No manual pre-processing decisions were necessary.

Simulation Notes

We sample 5,000 districting plans for Rhode Island. We assigned state senate districts to act like counties so that the simulations minimize the number of senate district splits.

Validation

Checklist

• [x] I have followed the instructions
• [x] I have updated the tracker
• [x] All TODO lines from the template code have been removed
• [x] I have merged in the master branch and then recalculated summary statistics
• [x] I have run enforce_style() to format my code
• [x] The documentation copied above is up-to-date
• [x] There are no data files in this pull request
• [x] None of the file output paths (for the redist_map and redist_plans objects, and summary statistics) have been edited

Additional Notes

Validation plot for number of state senate district splits.

@CoryMcCartan