2011-066 RES REDISTRICTING POLITICAL BOUNDARIES AND CITY COUNCIL DISTRICTS

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TAB 4 GENERAL HOUSEKEEPING Some attention should be given to "straightening" political boundaries into more uniform shape. In some cases, certain boundaries may be altered to use a more commonly understood or recognized physical boundary in lieu of a poorly identified or recognized boundary. Public Law 94-171, which directed the Census Bureau to develop a uniform mapping and demographic profiling approach for use by small computers, required that all voter tabulation districts (VTDs) follow census block boundaries. In many cases, City wards had been previously drawn in a manner that did not follow a census block boundary. This required the State of Texas, acting in conjunction with the State Data Center and the Texas Legislative Council, to move the actual voting district boundary to coincide with a nearby census block boundary for tabulation purposes only. The resulting VTD was no longer "actual," but an approximation referred to as a"pseudo-voting district." Every reasonable effort has been made to conform the pseudo voting district to actual political boundaries. However, due to the nature of the available data base, and the requirements of Public Law 94-171, there may be occasions in which the pseudo voting districts, or the resulting lines between City Council Wards, are di .fferent from those that actually exist. Again, the use of the pseudo voting district was for tabulation purposes only, and any apparent diff.erence between actual and apparent political lines should be considered as minimal. However, since all later census counts wil] be undertalcen upon the census blocks, there could be a valid argument that a necessity to alter current election district boundaries to match the census block format exists. Under these circumstances, new political lines will be required to avoid conflict with census block lines that do not match current political area definitions. While matching census blocks to actual politica] lines would not, in and of itself, generally support a decision to reapportion under the circumstances that exist in the City of Paris, there is a justifiable combination of factors that would support a reapportionment decision. These factors would include: 1. Redrawing election precincts to increase voter convenience. 2. Hacmonizing actual political lines with pseudo voting districts based upon census blocks. 3. Redrawing all lines to achieve "one-person-one-vote" deviations of the smallest possible percentage. Initial Assessment Page 8 of 9