Thread by @lekhashupeck

Just to answer a question this thread brought up:

https://twitter.com/lekhashupeck/status/1438023565148819459

I'm not asking anyone to get on complex software and draw a district that complies with a huge list of non-partisan redistricting criteria! I'm just asking people to talk about their communities and needs in a way that's specific.

If you say something like "Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point share industry, educational and cultural institutions, and have similar concerns as urban areas that are different from the surrounding rural areas, and therefore should be in the same Congressional district."

Guess what!? That's the kind of feasibily mappable comment I'm talking about.

Or if you say "my community consists of x, y, & z neighborhoods between roads A and B. Most people here work at the local hospital and their children attend C school, so we share similar concerns about healthcare and education funding. We should all be in the same House district"

That's also a feasibily mappable comment!

I'm asking you to do something a little harder than repeating someone else's talking points, but that's only because you have to sit down and think about things that are already a huge part of your daily life, and find a way to talk about them with specificity.

Again, I don't want to underestimate the difficulty of this, but I genuinely believe that most people have a local community that is meaningful to them and that they want to be fairly represented by remaining whole in a single district.

Whether your community is your local neighborhood, a few small cities (looking at you, Southern Pines, Pinehurst, and Aberdeen), the counties that you feel make up your region - these are all valid and important to advocate for in the redistricting process.

Again, I would love to see anyone who finds this daunting at one of our trainings. We will do our very best to walk you through writing this kind of comment and answer all of your questions.

https://twitter.com/lekhashupeck/status/1437919811892387844

The excellent @bribrough has even been working with people 1:1 to help them draft their comments.

We genuinely want to do everything we can to help make sure you use the opportunity to comment on redistricting in a way that is most likely to actually get us fairer maps in NC.