Brian Olson’s plans

Brian Olson has developed algorithms to create district plans for all the 50 states. He graciously agreed to share his plans for the states I am interested in. That will give me more material for comparing different measurements. They are written at the block level, with more granularity than my approach. I had to make some compromises to import them where one if my tracts contained blocks that were in different districts on Brian’s plan. Fortunately, there weren’t many situations like that – less than 3%, and when that happened, I put the tract in the district which had the majority of the blocks from that tract.When that was done, some of the district had disconnected tracts – and I had to manually scour through the displays to resolve them. When that was done, there was still a good deal of population imbalance – as much as 10%

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