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It’s only a small portion of Austin. If you take a sliver of a city where 20k people live and add it to a large rural district with 30k people across thousands of square miles you then spread the population of the dense city across the rural districts without overwhelming the ratio.
Utterly ridiculous stuff, how can the US call itself a democracy.
This is nothing new or unique. As much as it sucks when it’s blatantly obvious like this, there isn’t a true and objective way to draw perfect districts. If you cut the state into perfect squares then you group completely unrelated communities on either side of a large river that have nothing in common and one overwhelms the other. Sometimes one niche population is one county over from another one that’s twice the size. A lot of times a certain state does have a serious political bias. Independent districting committees with members from both sides still come up with wildly gerrymandered maps. A lot of times they aim for “highly competitive” elections where both sides have a real chance at winning any given election, but if the state is genuinely deep blue or red, that’s gerrymandered as well even if it “feels” democratic. 538 had an awesome map where you could visualize unfair advantages for each, highly competitive districts, compact districts (no absurd shapes like this one) and compact but follows existing county lines, but when ABC bought them they gutted everything good about 538 and just used the name for their existing garbage election reporting hoping to lure in a few more viewers so it’s now wiped off the face of the internet.
Australia has a rule that redistribution must bring the ratio of seats closer to the total ratio of votes when modelled on the previous election.
It's a strong objective way to prevent the worst abuses of subjective redistribution.
There are also equal(ish) population rules but I think the US probably has that too?