Election Maps: New York and Wisconsin

I love maps, as anyone knows who reads this blog. And fair elections. So when maps and fair elections come together — that's a blog subject for sure.

Here's the new New York House of Representatives map:

...and how the Independent Redistricting Commission thinks the various districts lean:

As an Upstate New York resident originally, I see what's happening in some of the finer points north of the city. (I can't tell what's going on south of the Hudson Valley or on Long Island.) 

Tompkins County, where Ithaca is located, is an island of Democratic voters in mostly Republican rural Central New York. It has been attached to the 19th District, running all the way to the Massachusetts border. 

The 22nd, just north of there, splits Cortland County, putting the city of Cortland (and students at SUNY Cortland) with Syracuse, which is an interesting choice. I assume that puts relatively more Democrats in that bucket. Overall, they've left each of the Upstate cities and their inner ring suburbs as intact units, which pretty much guarantees a Democratic outcome, vs. cracking each of those with outlying areas in each direction, which is what Republican-controlled legislatures like to do (as in Texas and Tennessee). 

For the parts of the state I'm most familiar with, most of the jagged lines between districts look like county lines or other clear boundaries to me, which is a good thing.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, its new state legislature maps were just signed into law by the governor after a 13-year battle to rebuild democracy in that state. (Democracy, in this case, means having legislative bodies that don't have 2/3 of their members from a party that got significantly less than half of the total vote statewide.)

Here are the new maps:

Part of the reason Republicans were previously able to get such disproportionate membership in the legislature was because they drew districts that selected the voters that worked them, sometimes down to individual houses. That sometimes meant drawing noncontiguous districts, which are prohibited by the state's constitution.

Here are a couple of examples of the extreme level of noncontiguous boundaries Republicans had resorted to in order to get the exact number of votes they needed to control the outcome of elections:

I saw a different example, zoomed in, where there was a square that held a single house and one business (with no residents) that was in a noncontiguous district, but I can't find it now. 

This is a trifecta of its own: maps to look at, fairer elections, and likely, therefore... fewer Republicans elected.