Give OKC A 2nd Voice In Congress In 2022

  Oklahoma's metropolitan centers have grown significantly in the past decade. The OKC metro area now overflows into 7 surrounding counties, and that trend will likely accelerate over the next decade. The CD5 representative has been the lone voice for OKC metro's million-plus residents.  CD4 has slowly inched into the OKC area (including Midwest City and other communities) but CD4 has mostly been a Southern Oklahoma entity. 
  It's time to make 2 congressional seats to represent the OKC metro area and facilitate the further growth which is forecast in the 2020's. 
  Sure, the 2 seats will also have to pick up some outlying counties, so we designed a map to start the discussion.  we also focused on keeping as many counties as possible wholly within one district. Oklahoma County will be the only one to get split right along Reno Avenue.

Sooner Politics proposes a congressional redistricting map to reflect the growth & heritage of Oklahoma

---

  Our proposed map also moves toward a reflection of the old tribal boundaries which suddenly became important when the US Supreme Court issued their McGirt ruling, on Tribal Indian Reservation rights.

• CD 3 incompasses most of the prairie tribes,
• CD4 is the heart of Chickasaw lands.
• CD2 is Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, & Seminole.
• ​CD1 & CD5 are designed around metropolitan growth centers.

Constitutional Principles of Redistricting:

  Civic representation is all about picking a leader to represent a group of citizens. But some boundaries are constitutionally set and never change. County & State boundaries don't move.
 But sending representatives to city, state, and national govt. bodies will be reset every 10 years. And that's a constitutional mandate. The fundamental right to equal representation requires that every citizen has as close to an equal voice as every other citizen.

  So we divided our seats in the lower chamber of congress among the 50 states, by population, in an attempt to get proportional weight of influence to each citizen. Oklahoma was given 5 seats in congress and that's probably not going to change for the next decade. Our 4 million(or so) residents will be divided geographically into 5 congressional seats of about 800,000 populace. 
  There are some fundamental goals that every state legislature seeks to instill in the redistricting process. 

• Respect current metropolitan entities.  Don't divide neighborhoods. Try to keep counties whole. Creating snake-like corridors to connect separate pockets of cherry picked constituents, have led to judicial adjudications and harmed the constitutional powers of the legislative branch.
• Be aware of cultural & lifestyle features. Oklahoma has kept CD2 & CD3 from being swallowed up by metropolitan sprawl. This contributed to Rep. Frank Lucas becoming the House Agriculture Chairman.  Markwayne Mullin & Tom Cole have advocated for tribal policy because of their district demographics.