Comparison of Districting Plans for the Virginia House of Delegates

At the time of writing, Virginia is in the process of replacing its House of Delegates districting plan after eleven of the districts were ruled unconstitutional by a District Court in June 2018. This report presents a large ensemble of alternative valid districting plans, which we propose to use as a baseline for comparison in the evaluation of newly proposed plans. Our method highlights and quantifies the dilutive effects of packing Black Voting Age Population. This is a novel application to racial gerrymandering of industry-standard techniques from statistics and computational science.