Redistricting should result in voting districts where elected officials represent the everyday concerns of their voters. Your representative should be your advocate, focused on your school district, your health & safety, your water systems and your local economy. Your representative should advocate for the interests of your town, city and county. The redistricting proposals of our NH legislature in HB50, HB52, SB 240 and SB 241 needlessly ignore these tenets of community-based representation.

Our team of residents — the Map-a-Thon Project — is determined to demonstrate the best practices of redistricting to the voters and the legislature. Our effort is guided by a concept called Communities of Interest (COIs), defined with the help of over 300 residents who told us these factors were most important: shared high school districts, shared police/fire/ambulance services, shared water/sewer services, health service regions and shared issues like pollution, traffic & poverty.

We demonstrated that nonpartisan redistricting could follow the rules, consider COIs, and be competitive — all factors that benefit both the voters and the political parties. Not only have we drawn our own maps, but we’re using what we’ve learned to evaluate the maps from the state legislature. What we found isn’t pretty.

Our detailed reports are here opendemocracyaction.org/maps, and the key points are summarized below.

The legislature’s SB 241 proposal for Executive Council districts has little regard for communities of interest and largely ignores county lines. As with the current map, 19 school districts and seven counties are split by the district lines. This needn’t be the case; Map-a-Thon’s map splits only three school districts and keeps county lines intact.

The 24 state Senate districts proposed in SB240 also do not consider community needs. It ignores school districts and counties and does not keep districts equal in population. The state Senate district boundaries proposed by Map-a-Thon preserve more school district and county boundaries, while also achieving a smaller difference between the lowest and highest-population districts.

The NH House maps in HB50 contain numerous large floterial districts, one containing more than 30,000 residents, and diminish our constitution’s goal of truly local representation. Compared to Map-a-Thon’s maps, the legislature denied 16 more towns their dedicated House districts, in violation of the state Constitution. In Grafton County, Canaan and Hanover should have their own representative seats, yet they were forced to share with neighboring towns. In addition, Grafton County has a very large floterial district with 10 towns sharing representation.

The HB 52 Congressional district map, which garnered the most attention, discards 140 years of precedent to radically change Congressional Districts 1 and 2, needlessly shifting 75 towns and 365,706 Granite Staters. While the prior district boundaries were relatively competitive, the proposed boundaries are heavily polarized, with District 1 predictably Republican and District 2 predictably Democratic. This is pure gerrymandering. Map-a-Thon’s analysis verified it, as did analyses by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, FiveThirtyEight, and the ACLU. Just as in the marketplace, voters should demand competition in their voting districts.

The Map-a-Thon’s technical volunteers have included our lead mapper, David Andrews, a UNH-trained engineer; John Cross, a systems engineer; Jeffrey Smith, a retired financial executive; Phil Hatcher, a retired UNH computer science professor; Kim Frost, an epidemiologist and global health data expert; Ian Burke, a research and survey design consultant; and over 300 other Granite Staters who helped to define COIs and collected data in almost every town.

We demonstrated that fair, nonpartisan district maps can follow the law, represent important citizen interests, and maintain competitive elections. Why has our legislature refused to do the same? Voters need to speak up now!

Bill Brown is a member of the Map-a-Thon Citizen Mapping Project’s Mapping and Technical Team. He lives in Hanover.