As newly approved redistricted legislative district boundary plans are released our spatial analysis team has been running compactness analysis on each one (see Daniel McGlone’s recent blog on his analysis of the approved PA congressional boundaries – http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/2011/12/pennsylvania-congressional-redistricting-we-have-a-plan/). Our growing collection of official, state-approved legislative district boundaries is not just tickling our intellectual fancy – We are also methodically adding the new boundary files to our Cicero API data collection and making it available through a new call we’ve recently added to the API.

This new call has proven to be a big hit with organizations wanting to preemptively match their constituents to the districts they will belong to when the new district boundaries take effect.  This enables organizations to prepare their constituent databases for rapid call-to-action campaigns directed at new legislatures, analyze their constituents by districts for the next election cycle, and more.

To use the GeocodingService or MapGeneration service to access newly drawn districts based on the 2010 census:

• Simply append the suffix “_2010″ to the DistrictType parameter in any method (for example, you would use the DistrictType NATIONAL_LOWER_2010 to see the new House districts and STATE_UPPER_2010 to see new State Senate districts).
• ALL_2010 will return all the new districts available for any given location.
• If new districts are not yet available for a given location, the SOAP response will not return district responses for the location.

We are tracking when each state’s new legislature officially takes office (in the majority of cases, this is when the new boundaries take effect). As each state takes office, we will be moving the 2010 boundaries to the current boundary dataset.  In other words, keep using the DistrictType calls the way you are using them now and we will do the updating work for you!

New states will continue to be added as we receive and process the data.

Questions?  Feel free to contact us: http://www.azavea.com/products/cicero/contact/

At first glance we were taken aback, most notably by District 7, which got more “Wow what is that?” remarks in the office than the earthquake. There is a lot to say about this monstrosity, certain to be a poster child for future gerrymandering studies. We’ve been able to perform some basic GIS analysis on the new districts today and will present some findings below. Next week, we’ll write about some of the methods used to create the numbers we are presenting.

First off, here’s the numbers you have been waiting for: compactness, demographics and voting tendency for the current and proposed congressional districts:

UPDATE 12/19/2011: We have added statistics for the Democratic congressional redistricting proposal:

As you can see, using both the Polsby-Popper and Schwartzberg methods of calculating district compactness (read up about how those are calculated by taking a look at our gerrymandering white paper), the proposed congressional districts are slightly less compact than the districts currently in effect. While that may not seem like a lot, keep in mind that Pennsylvania’s current districts are already some of the least compact in the nation, according to our study. District 7, represented by Patrick Meehan (R), takes the honor of having the eighth least compact congressional district in the nation. Of all the newly drawn congressional districts, it is the fifth least compact in the nation. Have a look for yourself:

District 7 snakes its way through southeastern Pennsylvania in five counties. In some cases, the district is as narrow as 800 feet across, like here along the Pennsylvania turnpike:

In a matter of seconds, you could drive in three separate congressional districts, without even speeding! But I hope you brought your boat, or at least a swimsuit. Just a few miles northeast of there outside Norristown, District 7 leaps across the Schuylkill river. To stay in the district, you’ll need to cross – but there’s no bridge.

Why are the lines so screwy? We could speculate that it may be for incumbent protection. In its new form, District 7 now has a GOP advantage by almost four points, reversing the five point Democratic advantage in the current plan. One thing is for certain: it looks like we’ll have plenty of material for another gerrymandering study. If you want to stay up to date on all of our redistricting work, follow the Cicero team on twitter.

The proposal has met with marked controversy from some groups in Ohio. Here’s a look at how the districts shape up using two measures of compactness, Polsby-Popper and Schwartzberg. For more detailed information on how each is calculated and why compactness is important for legislative districts, see Azavea’s Redistricting 2010 White Paper.

First, it’s important to note that in the proposed plan the target population is met for each of the districts to within one person. However, this is not without its drawbacks when it comes to compactness. It appears that the redrawing has resulted in much less compact districts overall. Note that the statewide average is now considerably lower using the Polsby-Popper and Schwartzberg methods of measuring compactness. If these districts went into effect today, Ohio on average would have some of the least compact congressional districts in the nation. The Midwest Democracy Network, which recently held a redistricting competition in Ohio, said that the proposed plan scores lower than any of their user submitted plans.

A Closer Look: District 15

Perhaps one of the most interesting changes comes in the form of District 15 in Central Ohio, represented by freshmen Representative Steven Strivers. The district is transformed from a compact area representing much of Columbus city and its western suburbs to a meandering one that snakes from northeast of Dayton to over 100 miles east before reversing direction and heading back west.

How does the district expand to all this new geographic territory? By removing much of the densely populated areas of Columbus. But the district still does include certain slivers of the city, such as a finger that extends into downtown. The district is also barely contiguous as its boundaries weave in and out of the city limits. In one part of Southwest Columbus, a sliver of the district is only as wide as a major roadway, skipping over a shopping center to include a car dealership on the other side.

What do you think? Join the conversation by following the Cicero Twitter account. Throughout the next several weeks we’ll be following up with redistricting across the U.S. on this blog and our Twitter.

Why?  One of our core principles is to do work that is meaningful and encourages positive changes in the communities our clients serve.  Welcoming Tyreek amongst us seemed like a tangible and meaningful, albeit small, way to make a positive impact in the life of someone from our community.  During one of our Management Team meetings, I presented the idea and we all voted unanimously that Tyreek should join us for his internship.  This is his account of his stay with us.  It is my hope Tyreek will remain in touch with us.  We all wish him the best as he prepares to apply to college and develops his professional career.

“Though I was only here for six weeks, these six weeks were some of the most wonderful six weeks, I have had in my entire life.  My internship with Azavea was amazing, everyone in the office was kind, helping, and just plain, awesome.  I have never seen a place so vibrant, everyone is almost always busy working with something but when you go and ask them something there is never a bad atmosphere about them.  Each week I was assigned a different team and a different assignment, and as a result more insight on what Azavea had to offer.

The first week I worked with the Law Enforcement team, consisting of Bennet, Jeremy, and Kenny, as a beta tester, using a demo of their HunchLab product to find any problems or bugs in the software.  I greatly enjoyed the application as well as the way they explained things to me.  HunchLab is a web-based geographic crime visualization, early warning, and risk forecasting software.  HunchLab and the team developing it were so great that at the end of the week I reluctantly had to go.

But the fun did not stop there, the next week was the Cicero team, with Abby, Andrew, and Daniel.  During my week with Cicero, which is an address-based legislative district matching and elected official look up web API, I gathered and entered data about previous elections for various countries.  That was definitely a challenge, an interesting challenge, considering how little is known about a lot of old elections for a lot of countries.

The next week I was placed with the PhillyHistory / Sajara team, which consists of Deborah and Carissa.  PhillyHistory.org offers a geographic search, mapping and display of historic assets in Philadelphia.  This was also one of my favorite weeks because I really enjoyed surfing through all the historic photos they had of the city I live in.  The entire week was spent with me going through the pictures and recording data, but the pictures I saw made me feel closer to Philadelphia.

The next week I worked with the DecisionTree team helping them install Ubuntu, which was awesome and gave me a feel for Ubuntu and an OS other than the Windows or Mac OS X.   I really enjoyed how Tamara,  Josh and Erik, let me get a feel for the software and the OS on my own but were there to help me when I stumbled or, was stuck.

My last week, I was with the Land Records team and worked on their PWD Stormwater Billing Application.  Though I knew very little about the application it was still fun.  I was assigned with the task to find ways to break or hack the web app so they could fix it.  Matthew and Justin were extremely helpful when it came to parts of software that I found that did not work or had some bugs.

Overall my time here at Azavea was a great one and I wish I could do it again.  Everyone was approachable and reasonable, but I would like to personally thank Ms. Rachel, because my stay there was twice as wonderful because of her.  She always made sure I had what I needed, if I needed more of anything, if I was making out okay, and if there was ever anything that she herself could not help me with she tried hard to find someone that could.” – Tyreek Elam

• Elected Officials lookups – enter an address and find your representatives as well as a list of their top contributors [we’re excited that this lookup service is powered by our Cicero API
• Campaign Contribution database
• Election Reform advocacy – including redistricting, campaign finance and ethics
• Open Government and Transparency advocacy
• City and State Government watchdog – with a diminished print media, there is an increasing need for other organizations to supplement the normal role of newspapers

Over the next year, Common Cause/PA hopes to add additional information for Pittsburgh as well as extend the contribution databases as well as its ability to report on government activities.

Redistricting the Nation allows the public to:

• Enter their address (nation-wide) and view the “shape” of their federal, state, and local election districts.
• Learn who is in charge of drawing the boundaries of their election districts (e.g., independent commissions or elected representatives).
• Compare the “compactness” scores of their election district to other, similar districts (less compact and unusually shaped districts are more likely to be gerrymandered).
• Draw new district boundaries on a map and generate compactness scores for the new district.

RedistrictingTheNation.com Screenshot

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.

• Storage
• Points, lines and polygons
• Attributes
• Indexable
• Searchable
• Client libraries in Java, C#, PHP, etc.

Of course, Google doesn’t announce anything until it’s released, but supposedly we can expect something in the next month.  How is this relevant to Azavea?  We will likely take a look at this as soon as it’s released and consider it as a low cost way to store and retrieve our growing library of polygon data used by our Cicero API.  A lot will depend, however, on the specific features of the Google Maps Data API as well as license terms and performance.

UPDATE 4/19/2009: Google has released the new API at Where 2.0 this week.  Querying the data looks like it’s limited to a feature ID, so we couldn’t use this for any spatial queries yet, but as a spatially enabled data repository, it looks very promising.  And if Google adds some basic spatial query capabilities, it will be a compelling environment for hosting basic vector mapping capabilities.

• Watershed boundaries for the U.S. at the HUC-2, HUC-4, HUC-6 and HUC-8 levels
• County boundaries for the U.S.
• School district boundaries for the U.S.
• New cities
• We’ve changed our map boundary display services to that it can be more easily mashed up with GoogleMaps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, ArcGIS Server or other web mapping systems. We’ve also added transparency, color and boundary styling control.
• Changed the layout so it’s easier to read and will display faster
• Did some re-skinning of the graphic design

And we are adding more data all the time.  We’re currently at almost 10,000 legislative boundaries, more than 11,000 elected officials and almost 15,000 non-legislative boundaries (watersheds, police districts, etc.) I’m pretty excited about the new public version of Cicero and we are continuing to think about new ways we can enhance the data and highlight capabilities of the API.  Do you have ideas?  What’s the next city, state or country we should add?  Are there other features we should add to the API or the Live verson? Check it out and let us know.

Screenshot of Cicero Live

There were some really interesting approaches that we hadn’t considered in Azavea’s original gerrymandering white paper, but perhaps the most interesting to me was a proposal by Sam Hirsch, an attorney at Jenner and Block, for a open competitive process.  I’ve always thought that a game-like piece of software that would enable the public to develop and submit plans for scoring based on an objective set of metrics would be a way to both engage the public and have the added educational value of teaching people about geography of politics.   Hirsch has actually written up an open, competitive process (sans game-like software) into a model constitutional amendment for states.  Hirsch’s plan calls for a basic set of metrics that must be met before a plan can be submitted and then a set of additional measurements (county integry, partisan fairness and competitiveness) by which each plan would be measured.  Any submitted plan would have to score higher on these metrics than the previous best plan to be accepted.  At the end of the process, the highest scoring plan would be the winner.  An approach like this would create the kind of transparent but competitive atmosphere that would probably result in strong public engagement as well as lively debate.