With the 2010 Census and subsequent reapportionment and redistricting fast approaching, the Cicero team has been plugging away on an updated version of the Gerrymandering white paper and a companion website (keep your eyes peeled for more news). A key part of this process has been an expansion of the metrics used to measure district compactness, which is often used as a proxy to assess the extent of gerrymandering.

As we’ve run the calculations over the past few months, the members of the team have cultivated a sense of mixed horror and wonderment at the feats of contorted district drawing achieved at every legislative level. We’ll frequently send images or call colleagues over as we come across particularly astonishing examples. Most of our analysis has been conducted in ArcMap, supplemented with some of the great tools in the ET GeoWizards plugin. Once we have identified polygons of geometrically low compactness, we overlay the district boundaries on a base map to see how they correspond to the physical geography of the area.

One of my personal favorites has long been U.S. House District 4 in Illinois, based on the shape of the area alone. Imagine my surprise when I took a look at the district in context and discovered that the town of Cicero lies smack dab in the heart of the district. What a strange coincidence and incongruity that the Roman statesman who serves as the namesake of our elected official lookup application has also lent his name to a city in one of the strangest-looking legislative districts in the country.

We’ve decided to take this as a sign that fates of the two Ciceros are set to coincide: we hope that the tools provided by Azavea’s Cicero API and on our forthcoming Redistricting the Nation website can facilitate public engagement through a transparent and open process that brings fair districting to every part of the country.