Room for improvement on the Senate map
Draw the Lines PA is a nonpartisan, statewide education initiative around how Pennsylvania draws its voting districts. Since 2018, we've engaged over 7,200 Pennsylvanians in drawing their own congressional and legislative districts. Accordingly, we've learned a fair amount about what average Pennsylvanians want out of the redistricting process. Learn more at drawthelinespa.org. The preliminary Senate plan appears to be a modest improvement over the current map, with room to get better. It splits fewer counties -- 22 versus 25 -- and the same number of municipalities (6). It is between 1 to 7% more compact. The preliminary map is slightly more politically balanced, though it still holds an embedded Republican advantage (5.4%, versus 7%). It has a wide population deviation (9.6%), which could be improved. Intentional or not, it prioritizes incumbency more so than the House map (only one set of incumbents matched together), which was a value that our mappers roundly rejected. Draw the Lines is not endorsing any particular alternative, but we can easily point to another map drawn by a member of our Citizen Map Corps that improves upon the preliminary Senate map in every metric. It demonstrates that the LRC can do better in its final Senate map. Draw the Lines is not endorsing any particular senate map as an alternative. However, in our exception for the senate map we will link to another map drawn by a member of our Citizen Map Corps from Pike County that improves upon the preliminary senate map in every metric, at the expense of four sets of incumbents being bunked together. It’s a demonstration that the LRC can do better in its final Senate map: https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::00054f59-dfb7-4b08-b854-ba8c3d35e830