One of the biggest questions before the Council is how much to make the wards even versus minimizing the amount of change.

They could make minimal changes, just taking about 1,200 people out of ward 2 and adding less than 1,000 to wards 7 and 8 to get all to acceptable sizes of plus or minus 5% from the average of 75,215. Or they could bring all wards within about 2% of the average, which would require moving about 3,300 people out of ward 2, about 2,700 into 7, and about 3,000 into 8.

In other words, getting close to the average requires moving about 3 times as many people. Plus, since ward 7 doesn’t border 2 and 8 only borders 2 through Hains Point, the only way to make all of those shifts is to move a lot of people in and out of wards 6 and, to a lesser extent, 5.

Which approach should the Council choose? Based on the responses from people in all wards on our Redistricting Game, they should lean toward minimalism.

Part 2, which looked at the wishes of people who lived in individual areas, provides some reasons. There are many areas near ward borders where those who made maps preferred to switch to a different ward, but in only one case, the piece of Fairlawn in Ward 7, did a plurality prefer to switch into a ward that needs to grow or out of one that needs to shrink. If we gave residents of each small area their choice, the wards would become less equal, not more.

We can also compute a standard deviation for each map, measuring how much the populations of each ward are clustered together around the average or spread out. I broke up the range in deciles from the map with the lowest standard deviation, 943, to the one with the highest, 8,370.

The standard deviations also skew toward the larger (right), which suggests us that respondents generally favored fewer changes over making the wards equal.

Did people in any ward make substantially more changes to the maps than in any other?

Everyone generally favored relatively few changes. People in Ward 6 especially chose fewer changes, which isn’t surprising as more changes likely mean moving pieces of their ward to other wards.

Ward 7 residents did make more 6-8 change maps over 3-5 change maps, while Ward 8 residents chose the reverse. Since our sample sizes are smaller for wards 7 and 8, this could also be noise.

Did people in any ward choose different ward sizes for theirs or another ward than the average?

Most of the wards are pretty constant based on the size of the resident’s ward. Ward 6 residents did make their ward larger and ward 7 smaller than others on average. Ward 8 residents made their ward bigger on average.

For some reason, ward 7 residents had the largest Ward 2s and the smallest Ward 5s, but they didn’t make their own Ward 7s that big. Again, with a smaller sample size this could also be noise.

Whether some of the individual ward differences are significant or not, the DC Council need not feel obligated to make all wards even. A more minimal solution would make more residents happy, at least based on those who used the Redistricting Game.

Certainly, this is not a scientific survey or a plebiscite. But neither will the Council’s hearings on redistricting next week reflect true average resident sentiment. The way residents responded to the Redistricting Game, especially when considered on a ward by ward basis to account for higher usage in some areas than others, do provide useful inputs to the Council’s deliberations.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.