Mr. Shirazi, I'm a huge political nerd at the University of Maryland (political science and geography degrees) who has been following your tweets re. Virginia redistricting. Would it be possible for you to email me at arionz@comcast.net to discuss this map ... and others? I have some good ideas (imho !) re. how to make Virginia redistricting truly fair this time (and not let the process be hijacked by political operatives as now increasingly appears to be the case) ... thank you, Marion Zimmer

Overall this map does a good job of trying to be fair while also being compact. Despite some odd looking boundaries you get what will be a 5-4-2 D/R/Toss-up map and communities of interest are generally kept together. This matches the overall partisan breakdown of the state as it is now in 2021 while not building districts that are too-focused on protecting incumbents as the districts likely to go to one party or another are not deeply packed for that party. The few odd splits in central VA (7, 5 and 4) are needed to keep the map from leaning too far towards one party or another and keeping the map VRA compliant. This would likely be less messy with one additional congressional seat but unfortunately we only have 11 to work with. I think the commission should really strongly consider this one as it seems much more fair and reflective of the current political reality in VA.