A court just struck down one Maryland House district. Here's how we'd undo the entire gerrymander

Daily Kos Elections recently submitted a proposed congressional map to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan's redistricting commission, which is working to help the state comply with a federal court ruling that struck down the 6th District as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that violates the First Amendment rights of Republican voters. The commission unanimously chose our map to submit to the legislature, which must now pass a map of its own to submit to the court.

Our proposal prompted some excellent discussion, but one question came up repeatedly: What about the rest of the state? Anyone can see that Maryland’s congressional lines are a gerrymandered mess, so why didn’t we try to improve the entire map? The answer is that the court’s ruling applied to just a single district, so we made adjustments only to the 6th and the adjacent 8th in order to remedy the violations the court identified.

But we have plenty of ideas on how to fix the rest of Maryland’s map. This post takes a look at how we’d redraw the entire map if given the chance.

As shown on the map at the top of this post (click here for a larger image and here for the map's demographic and partisan statistics), our proposed districts dramatically reorient the map relying strictly on traditional nonpartisan criteria laid out in our amicus brief to Pennsylvania's Supreme Court in a similar case last year. Those criteria include adhering to federal law and the Voting Rights Act; ignoring partisan statistics and incumbency; preserving communities of interest; keeping cities and counties whole; and compactness.

As you can see, the map above features much cleaner lines (though these shouldn’t be fetishized) and splits just four counties. The key changes:

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