"This district was drawn, along with the other two districts, specifically to have an equal number of constituents through the district," he says. "All three districts have exactly the same number. All three have rural parts of the state in them. All three have parts of Salt Lake County. The intention in drawing this, was to have equality of rural and urban and equality of numbers."
In the 1990's, District 2 was contained entirely within Salt Lake County. Now, it contains portions of Salt Lake and Utah Counties, as well as all of Wasatch, Duchesne, Daggett, Uintah, Carbon, Uintah, Emery, Grand, San Juan, Wayne, Piute, Garfield, Kane, Iron, and Washington Counties.
Now, all three districts radiate from where UT-201 ("The 21st South Freeway") crosses the Jordan River.
Also, do these boundaries make sense to anyone?
The white areas above belong to Rob Bishop. The grey areas belong to Jim Matheson. There's no secret that this is one of the most Liberal neighborhoods in Utah, and has been for a long time. It's just a coincidence that this is where they chose to get their equal population numbers, right?
-Bob
3 comments:
I wonder what the neighborhood would tell us about the geographic oddities. Perhaps individual contributors or owners of businesses that made contributions to Cannon were in the 3rd district protected pockets.
By replacing single member districts with more competitive and representative multi-member districts under a proportional representation electoral system, voters could "district" themselves.
But local Democrats just refuse to give up their bit role in Utah's two-party duopoly.
Democratic whining about redistricting will continue to fall on my dear ears until elected Utah Democrats introduce legislation to open up the political system to real competition.
In Utah, proportional representation would result in an even greater monopoly by the Republicans than what we have now. Many people who vote for Democrats do so because of who they are, not because of the D behind their name. They default to the R a big part of the time.
And, the third parties would get 3-4legislators total, if they were lucky.
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