College students compete to redraw Virginia’s congressional districts

RICHMOND — When Brian Cannon, a third-year student at William and Mary Law School, sat down to try to best Virginia’s politicians at coming up with fair, common-sense congressional districts, his first instinct was to try to do it the way they do: He started with the state’s existing map.

Trying to align each of the commonwealth’s sprawling congressional districts — drawn for partisan advantage in 2001 — to new population figures from the 2010 Census, he lopped counties off districts that had more people than they should. And he squeezed new territory into districts that were too small, all in an effort to meet the Constitution’s requirement that each district be about the same size.

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But he quickly grew frustrated.

“They’ve been so gerrymandered over the years,” he said. “It was impossible to do in a way that genuinely meets the criteria without starting from scratch.”

Cannon and fellow law school students at William and Mary decided they had to take a fresh look at the maps, without regard to incumbency, to come up with new districts.

Cannon and his team were one of six groups that won cash prizes Tuesday in different categories for Virginia’s first redistricting contest, in which 150 college students on 13 Virginia campuses competed to draw the most compact legislative districts that best respected community boundaries.

The competition is one prong of a public campaign to try to persuade the politicians in charge of the redistricting effort to draw maps that aren’t designed to protect incumbents or enhance partisan advantage.

The other is a bipartisan advisory commission established by Gov. Robert F. Mc­Don­nell (R) that will make recommendations next week to the General Assembly about the process.

Public power

The two efforts come ahead of a special legislative session that will open April 4, when the General Assembly will take on its once-a-decade task of drawing new legislative boundaries.

“For the first time ever, there’s going to be something to compare their maps to,” said Quentin Kidd, director of Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Public Policy and a director of the contest. “It’s just going to be really hard for the General Assembly to approve maps that protect” incumbents, Kidd said.

Ten years ago, expensive computer software let politicians predict demographics and voting behavior at a precinct level, giving them sophisticated power to try to draw districts to their partisan advantage. But now that software is available to the public.

Michael McDonald, an associate professor at George Mason University and a leader of a project to make redistricting software more publicly available, said it gives voters unprecedented power.

Politicians “no longer control this agenda in the way that they have in the past,” he said.

‘An independent look’

It’s not clear how much impact the pressure campaign will have on Virginia’s process.

Leaders in the Democratic-held Senate and GOP-held House of Delegates have been working behind the scenes on plans to redraw the state legislature. They plan to make them public and submit them for legislative review next week, then hold public hearings about them across the state.