Move over, politically appointed, behind-closed-doors, state redistricting commissions: There’s a new kid in town–a new, data-driven, non-political website that’s challenging old ideas about how to draw a Congressional district. And it may end up creating the first ever non-partisan map of all 435 congressional districts in the nation.<\/p>\n
DrawCongress.org<\/a> has just gone live [March 2011]. It’s a project created by Columbia University Law School students as an outgrowth of a course on redistricting and gerrymandering. According to its founders, DrawCongress.org has three goals:<\/p>\n As of this posting, students from the seminar have uploaded redistricting plans for New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado and Utah, with more to come.<\/p>\n You can view a proposed state plan by clicking a pushpin on the site’s US map. On each state, you can view two versions of Congressional districts: \u00a0a map of current district lines, plus a summary of the demographics and voting history of each district; and a proposal for redrawn districts.<\/p>\n The plans for redistricting also include explanations of how they would conform with “applicable requirements of state and federal law, including the requirement of one-person, one-vote and the Voting Rights Act of 1965…plus an explanation of the principles that guided the plan’s construction.”<\/p>\n According to DrawCongress.org, these principles include:<\/p>\n The site’s founders used Caliper Corporation’s\u00a0Maptitude for Redistricting software<\/a> to draw their plans. According to Caliper, this software is used by ” a supermajority of the state legislatures, political parties, and public interest groups.”<\/p>\n The program includes\u00a0Census geography and data, one-button conversion of existing plans to the latest TIGER geography, new and enhanced reports, a state-of-the-art interface, open access to industry-standard file formats, interoperability with Google Maps and Google Earth, an updated manual, video tutorials, context-sensitive Help, web solutions, and more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Citizen redistricting projects<\/strong><\/p>\n Columbia Law School students are not alone in their efforts to democratize this year’s redistricting efforts. Newly available software programs make it possible for almost anyone to create new district maps. USA Today <\/a>reports that:<\/p>\n As states move ahead with the redistricting mandated by results of the 2010 Census, these efforts will be worth watching–as a way of comparing the gerrymadered plans of politically motivated redistricting commissions with those that might be created democratically, with public input, and\u00a0based on\u00a0principles other than power-grabbing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Move over, politically appointed, behind-closed-doors, state redistricting commissions: There’s a new kid in town–a new, data-driven, non-political website that’s challenging old ideas about how<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,573],"tags":[945],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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