Coherency of districts + stepping away
It is hard to imagine that our elected representatives will take much of anything any citizens submit under this heading with any seriousness. And that is part of the problem that you need to fix. You need to show that what you want is a redistricting system that does not deliver the results that you and your party caucus need or expect. It should be a predictable system but not one that helps you retain control--or advance your own prospects. Gerrymandering is not a new problem in this republic. The word itself is old and the idea older. I don't expect you to live up to some unimaginably utopian standard. But you need to put two principles in front of retention of your own existing power. First, voters need at every level to be in districts that make organic sense and that contain everyday interactions and meaningful relationships. I interact a lot with people in Swarthmore. But I also shop and talk and relate to people along Route 1 in Springfield and into Media. I am in a school district with people in Wallingford, Nether Providence, and Media. I walk in Smedley Park and Ridley Creek State Park. I shop and go to restaurants along the Rt. 320 corridor. I work with people who travel to Swarthmore from Chester and up Septa line. I need to have some form of meaningful political relationship along all those lines. We should be voting, talking, debating together. I shouldn't be voting or talking or debating with people in South Philly or Wayne or Chadds Ford or maybe even Landsdowne, unless we're talking about federal representation. I shouldn't look around and see some neighborhood in Springfield that's been surgically cut out of my political relationships to make sure a Republican gets elected or vice-versa, they shouldn't be saying "Oh well Swarthmore and Wallingford have been surgically cut out of our world". We have to work it out--and you all have to start trying to represent people who come from more than one political tribe or perspective. I think to do that right you need to find a system that is at least somewhat mediated by data, by algorithms, by some logic that isn't directly political and calculated. I'm not stupid about this: garbage in, garbage out. You write an algorithm with bias in mind, it'll return you bias. But you need a system that gives you answers that you didn't expect and can't quite control based on some principle of how to identify who should vote with whom. It's plain that you can't be trusted by yourselves to do it right--the redistricting properly ordered by PA's courts, plus the outrageous behavior of some of the state GOP representatives in the 2020 election, demonstrates that. But this basic thought goes for everybody.