Redistricting 2.0: Cloud Lets Voters Take Part 83
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samzenpus
from the participate-in-your-own-manipulation dept.
from the participate-in-your-own-manipulation dept.
CWmike writes "As the 2010 U.S. census results arrived, Los Angeles County's politicians started ramping up for redistricting — the once-a-decade, computing-intensive, often contentious process of geographically carving up the populace into discrete parcels of voters. In the past, such decisions were made by politicians using expensive computer systems and software. Participation in the process was limited to an elite few who could afford experts who understood redistricting's arcane rules and GIS technology well enough to game them. This year, however, it won't just be the politicians and special interest groups poring over the data and tweaking boundary lines. All 4.5 million registered voters in LA County have access to a cloud-based redistricting application called the Public Access Plan that lets voters view and modify existing maps and boundaries, submit comments, and even create and submit their own plans from scratch. LA County is among the first government entities to consider providing Web-based tools that allow for direct public participation. 'This notion of public access has changed quite dramatically,' says Tim Storey, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures. 'Throwing that wide open is a big step.' The big question now is whether the public will use it."
For non-US readers (Score:5, Informative)
If you're not familiar with the US system of districting, how it works is that an area, like the state of New York gets a number of representatives (29 in NY's case) based on its population. The geography of the state is then split up into 29 regions and each region gets to choose its own representative. After the once-a-decade census, like we just had in 2010, states often will redistrict, which means that they pick the boundaries of those 29 regions. For the political parties involved, they want to draw the district boundaries such that they end up with a majority of citizens who will vote for their party in each district. They use voter registration records and census records to do so. The census records, while they don't include political party preference, do include race, age, family size, and income, all of which are good indicators of how someone will vote. As a result, redistricting is usually contentious, and often abused process.
I know that this probably isn't a complete or 100% accurate description of the process; feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes.