Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Illinois has just enacted maps for legislative and state supreme court (!) elections for the 2020s — but NOT congressional districts. Iowa and other states have been told that it is absolutely impossible to get anything close to the real numbers from the 2020 census until mid-August at the earliest. So how did it happen?

Illinois didn’t use the 2020 census numbers. According to St. Louis Public Radio, “Democratic leaders in the General Assembly moved forward using population estimates from the previous five years of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.” The first versions of the maps came out late on Friday, May 21, reports WBEZ. That appears to be what’s on the Illinois General Assembly website here, but it does not match detailed Google Maps interactive versions (House, Senate). You can tell right away because the Google versions show a district that runs from the Quad Cities through Galesburg to Macomb. The bill number in the headline also does not match news coverage.

On May 28, according to the Springfield State Journal-Register, the Illinois Legislature passed House Bill 2777. More accurately, they passed Senate Amendment 1 to House Bill 2777. That is one day after the filename of the Google maps linked above. What was originally in House Bill 2777? It began as a tiny bill with one purpose: “Extends the repeal date of the Cemetery Oversight Act from January 1, 2022 to January 1, 2030.” By the time it got out of the Illinois House, that was still in there, but there was a ton of other stuff thrown in.

Then the Senate got hold of it. “Replaces everything after the enacting clause. Creates the General Assembly Redistricting Act of 2021. Redistricts the Legislative Districts (for election of Senators) and the Representative Districts (for election of Representatives). Effective immediately.”

Iowa’s redistricting legislation specifies districts in plain text, specifying what streets or geographic features the districts follow or include. Illinois’ legislation uses 15-digit-long census tract numbers.

To summarize, in 14 days, Illinois Democrats introduced, revised, passed, and got signed a redistricting bill that does not use actual census data and started life as legislation related to the Cemetery Oversight Act.

To quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up.

I guess Map Day is officially the Friday of Memorial Day weekend now. Here’s the big new PDF.

• Dubuque’s Southwest Arterial is marked on both the main map and Dubuque inset. IA 32 is dead, US 52 has been removed from the city, and IA 3’s east end is at the now-former north end of 32, which is a logical place for it. The arterial has the full-size freeway line, which I wouldn’t be surprised to see reduced to a thinner line like IA 100 later.
• The US 30/US 218 interchange is marked, and has exit number 231.
• On the Waterloo-Cedar Falls inset, the IA 58 expressway has the Viking Road interchange and IA 27’s exit numbers on it.
• Pioneer, in the southwest corner of Humboldt County, is now an unincorporated dot.
• One thing it doesn’t have: 2020 city populations in the index. Will there be a stealth 2022 update that changes the index and, if necessary, city dot sizes?

Is that it? I’m not sure. I can’t think of anything else to jump out that wasn’t already on the 2019 or stealth-updated 2020 version. I would be hard-pressed to come up with “several hundred” to be sure. Shout out if you see something.

The Census Bureau released its county-by-county estimates on May 4. By “released”, I mean “said in advance they would be available but I had to dig into nested folders and stumble on a straight-outta-1995 icon list that led me to a CSV file containing year-by-year estimates for every county in the United States, copy rows T807-T906, and paste them into my pre-existing mock-district spreadsheet.”

Then came the biggest takeaways:

• The July 1, 2020 estimate (NOT the April 1 head count) adds 8491 people from the 2019 estimates, for a state estimate of approximately 3.16 million, and an ideal congressional district population of 2122 more each.
• The vast majority of Iowa’s 99 counties changed up or down by fewer than 200 people … except Polk and Dallas, which combined grew by 7630 — nearly 1% of a district! Nine and a half people moved to Dallas County every day.
• That, and 2600 more people in Johnson County, blew up every map I’d made.
• Notice that the estimated growth in those three combined is greater than the growth in the state estimate. The other 97 counties lost 1739.

While these numbers are closer to what will be used for creating Iowa’s districts, they aren’t exact. Keeping that in mind, let’s see how out of whack my maps got thrown.

Mock 1: Hinson’s nightmare (map)

Mock 2: Incumbent-safe (map)

Mock 4: The Marshall County Dangler (map)

Mock 5: Weird within adjusted parameters (map)

Mock 7: Double gerrymander (map)

So, yeah, everything went seriously off except for Mock 1 Districts 1 and 4 — the map that scrambles incumbents and separates Polk and Dallas counties — and Mock 2 District 1. However, every individual district meets the 1% deviation percentage variance threshold, as do Mock 1 and, ironically, the gerrymander maps. The rightmost columns for the 2011 districts were 76 and 0.01%.

It’s back to the map mines until the actual numbers come in September. Iowa’s Temporary Redistricting Advisory Commission still needs a fifth appointee. It’s, like, three meetings, right? Would I have to submit conflicts of interest?