Sunday, February 17, 2013

Precinct Roulette

I got a jury summons on Saturday.  It was for the Justice of the Peace Court of Don Coffey in Baytown.

That’s not right, I thought. 

Our JP has always (since 1983) been Tom Lawrence in Humble.  Honey and I have both had jury duty in his court – either in the old courtroom in downtown Humble or the new one on Will Clayton Parkway.  I’ll admit that I’ve voted a straight ticket in the last few elections, but the last time I voted for a JP, Tom is the one who got my vote. 

It turns out that although we haven’t moved our JP court has.

jp map

For purposes of justice, we are now in Harris County Precinct 3.

This bears no relation to the Commissioners’ Court precincts:

  com map

Although recently readjusted to give each Commissioner’s precinct approximately one million residents, the new lines still have us in Precinct 4.  There was a bit of politics involved in drawing these boundaries, and the shapes – especially of Precinct 1 and 2 – remind me of how the term Gerrymander came to be.

The JP map has twice as many precincts and follows the same boundary lines as the Constable Precincts:

comnstable map

 

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