CDR: Re: Close Elections and Causality

[Ken Brown]

Jim Choate wrote:

> I'd be surprised if many (any?) states have any sort of program to get
> people to perferentialy live in certain counties. I suspect the other
> counties might get upset.
> 
> I suspect Florida is quite similar.

But maybe to redraw the boundaries. That's a common problem in Britain.
Every now and again some government (almost always Conservative, for
reasons to do with gerrymandering I suspect) gets it into its head that
it would be a Good Thing if counties were more or less the same size so
tried to amalgamate smaller ones and split larger ones and "rationalize"
boundaries.

Also, I know that smaller cities in the USA often split themselves away
from larger ones and I don't know that counties don't. I've been to
Bellaire, Texas...

There were bad cases of redrawing boundaries in the UK in the 1960s, 
70s & 80s. Lancashire, which once upon a time had a population about the
size of Denmark or Belgium lost Liverpool and Manchester and large
chunks of the north-west coast. Totally new counties which no-one had
ever heard of before, such as Cleveland and Humberside were invented.
"County Boroughs" (i.e. a town or city which was its own county)  were
forcibly amalgamated into the counties surrounding them.  My own home
town, Brighton was forced to merge with East Sussex by the
Conservatives. At about the same time we lost our police force to the
Sussex police (for some reason the only thing the newspapers complained
about with losing the white helmets they used to wear - all the other
forces used blue or black) and our water supply (to enforced
privatisation). Most (but not all) of this sort of thing has been
changed back by the Labour government which is very slightly less
centralizing than the Tories were


Ken