pathological precincts

(a.k.a. wrog having fun with shapefiles, Part 27:)

(Background: Washington law has provisions for the use of bipartisan commissions to do redistricting, which are generally credited with producing mostly sane legislative and congressional district boundaries. No small-intestine districts here).

Anyway, just in case you were wondering, voting precincts in Washington (or at least in King County) need not be

• contiguous,
  there being eleven precincts in our district that have at least 3 connected components -- RNT 41-3287 has seven (7)),
• simply connected,
  BEL 41-3084 being of genus 1 [toroidal], i.e., it has an island in the middle of it belonging to CUTTHROAT -- which, by the way, has to be my all-time favorite precinct name.

To be fair, much of this seems to arise from reasonably convex county-council boundaries intersecting pathological city boundaries rather than any explicit attempt at gerrymandering.

Of course, the county-council boundaries have all changed now (Thank You Harder, Tim Eyman). And of course the new redistricting commission that met last December decided in their infinite wisdom to not follow existing precinct boundaries when drawing new districts, so there's yet more fun coming up.

yay, smoke-filled rooms

(a.k.a. Parties Just Suck sometimes)

Mark your calendar:

The 2005 King County Democratic Convention is scheduled for June 28. If you have any input into who you want nominated for your county council seat or for county executive, tell your Precinct Committee Officer (or, better yet, become one), because we're the ones who actually get to vote on this.

"But wait, nominations?" you ask, "Don't we have a Louisiana-style top-two primary now?" Good question, that.

As it happens, both the Democratic and Republican parties -- the Libertarians missed their threshold last time around, so they're not a major party in this state anymore -- have now decided that the law as currently written -- and I guess this includes Scalia's majority opinion that basically said that the major parties are really private organizations that can do whatever the hell they want -- allows them to choose their candidates in nominating conventions, completely bypassing the new primary system. Thus, even though there will be a primary in September and the top two coming out of it will go on to the November general, that won't necessarily have anything to do with who the Democratic and Republican nominees on the general ballot will be. Meaning, I guess, that the general ballot could now have up to 4 people on it...