Opinion ID: 1984918
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: Districts Equal In Population To The Greatest Practicable Extent

Text: The Murtha-McDade Plan (M-McD Exhs. 1-3) has achieved remarkable mathematical exactitude, with a maximum deviation of .0000017% and an average deviation of.0000009%. However, the Murtha-McDade Plan falls below others precisely because the cost of achieving maximum mathematical equality lies in having the congressional district boundaries split 22 election precincts as well as 27 local governments. Although 22 precincts constitute a small fraction of the 9,434 precincts in the state (R1:164), a serious election administration problem arises from requiring the voters in a single precinct to look to two different sets of congressional candidates. Shayer. The problem is not a minor one. It arises from the fact that exactitude requires manipulation of the smallest census unit, the census block; Pennsylvania has 300,000 of them (R1:164) and their boundaries, based on visual limits useful to census taker functions, are not coterminous with the governmentally determined boundaries of the 9,435 election precincts. Of course, redrawing official precinct boundaries to match the ideal congressional district is theoretically possible, but is not practical because each election precinct must serve many other different exercises of the franchise  for the election of legislators and council members, for example. Nearest to the Murtha-McDade Plan in exactitude is the O'Donnell Plan B (O-B Exhs. 4-6), with a .0083% maximum deviation (R1:16), a .0027% average deviation (R1:20) and no split precincts. Also close in equality of districts is Plaintiffs' Plan 2, with .0111% maximum deviation (R1:14), a .0024% average deviation, and with three split precincts, one of which affects no population. The Loeper Plan, splitting just one precinct, has only a slighter higher deviation, at .1334% maximum and .0324% average. The Murtha-McDade Plan proponents have questioned the validity of data adjustments made by the Legislative Data Processing Center and therefore affecting all of the other plans at issue, as drawn by legislative caucuses. The Executive Director of the Legislative Data Processing Center described how the Center dealt with the problem which arises when a census block is split between two precincts or among more than two precincts (R1:162). This problem involves 2.6% (7,915) of the 300,000 census blocks in Pennsylvania; none of the census blocks are split across any municipal boundary. Rather than arbitrarily assign a split census block entirely to one precinct or another, the Legislative Data Processing Center, since 1980, has divided the census block population between the two precincts in proportion to the ratio of voting registrations in the two precincts. The Murtha-McDade proponents' question is based on the contention that such an adjustment can be an invalidating factor because it departs from the official U.S. census figures. However, no authority for that proposition has been presented, and it is obvious that an arbitrary assignment of all of the population of a split census block to just one of the precincts would provide a result necessarily less accurate, and therefore less valid than the adjustment described. Further evaluation of these plans, all of which are acceptable in terms of population equality, must ultimately depend upon other criteria. Karcher.