Redistricting Extravanganza

Last Monday, The Minnesota House released its proposal for the 2012 redistricting for the Minnesota State Legislature. Rep. Sarah Anderson (R-Plymouth) submitted the proposal, which passed the House Redistricting Committee on a 7-5 vote along party lines. 

Twin Cities Metro Area House Redistricting Plan

Anderson stated that the plan intended to keep cities, counties, and areas of common interest confined to one district. Democrats have attacked the plan as partisan, pairing up several incumbants as lines are redrawn. None of this is surprising.  And here in Minnesota, with a Republican-controlled State Legislature and a Democratic Governor, redistricting will likely end up being drawn by the court system anyway.

It's pretty darned easy these days, especially with the redistricting software out there, to draw areas that are small, compact, and accomplish political ends at the same time. And some of the biggest names in mapping make redistricting software.

Some places, such as Sacramento, have put redistricting software online for the public to use for free. It's pretty self-explanatory for someone who is familiar with the way mapping software works, but for a novice, it could be pretty daunting. Anyone can try it out and submit a plan. (Note: Their deadline for input of publicly drawn plans is May 16, 2011.)

The Redistricting Game

There's a great online educational program about the redistricting process called The Redistricting Game [warning: there's automatic audio on the intro page] that walks you step by step through some of the hurdles that redistricting process faces: politicians who gerrymander to give their party an edge over the other, politicians who gerrymander in a bipartisan manner to preserve incumbency, and the complexities of creating minority majority districts allowed under the Voting Rights Act.  The game is a simpler attempt at doing redistricting, and there's basic and advanced levels of the game.

A hypothetical 2012 redistricting I did for Nebraska's three CDs using Dave's Redistricting Online

A hypothetical 2012 redistricting I did for Nebraska's
three CDs using Dave's Redistricting Online

Want to do it all yourself with real state-level data?  "Dave's Redistricting Online" has a free online application to do just that. It's fun to play around with, even if you just want to hypothetically gerrymander your favorite state senator into an open Congressional seat.  You basically just color the map with your cursor. There are options to base your plans on the 2000 apportionment, or just start from scratch.  Dave's tool lets you change the number of seats you're drawing for, which is good if your state was on the bubble of gaining or losing a Congressional seat.

The tool also keeps track of race and ethnicity data -- both for voting age persons and the general population -- by each individual voting district and by your newly drawn Congressional district.  Plus, it will let you know how each geography voted in the 2008 Presidential election.  That's handy if you want to lean a district to one party or another. It will export the data by precinct into a csv file, which could be easily joined to if you had a corresponding shapefile.

If Congressional reapportionmant is not up your alley, you can also draw up state level legislative districts with the tool, because Dave lets you crank that number of seats for which you're drawing boundaries up to 499.  Want to draw lines for the 99 Wisconsin State Assembly seats?  Not a problem.  Want to draw lines for the 203 seats in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives?  Still not a problem.  The 400 seats in the New Hampshire House?  Yes, Dave's program will let you do draw those 400 districts, but New Hampshire draws their districts by county and often has multiple representatives per district, so his tool isn't going to help you.

The program does have some minor flaws.  It could use a bigger paintbrush or a way to select multiple voting districts at a time, perhaps an entire county. (Coloring every voting district in Clark County, Nevada?  A bit of a pain.) But for a free educational mapping tool that churns out some decent maps and a ton of demographic data?  I'm impressed.