In many parts of the United States, this year’s congressional elections will not be decided by the votes cast on November 7. The results have been decided in advance by the political parties in each of the states through a process called gerrymandering. Since the term was first coined in 1812, gerrymandering – the creation of electoral districts with the goal of encompassing a certain percentage of voters from one political party – has been part of the American political landscape.
Why is it is important to care? This increasingly widespread practice is having a serious and pervasive effect on American democracy. The redrawing of district boundaries for partisan advantage reduces the impact of individual voters on the election, resulting in lower voter turnout and less competitive races. The advent and consistently expanding use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has created both new potential for sophisticated gerrymandering and a possible means of implementing unbiased redistricting.
With Election Day just around the corner, Avencia Incorporated, a Philadelphia-based GIS company, set out to measure the gerrymandering of local and federal electoral districts across the US. The result of this study is a white paper, released today, ranking the ten most gerrymandered local and federal districts in the country. Click Here to access the white paper.
This analysis was made possible by Avencia’s Cicero™ Elected Official Web Services, developed in 2005 as a cost effective and accurate way for local governments, unions, businesses and non-profit political and advocacy organizations to find their local elected officials. Cicero was designed to enable these groups to empower their citizens and members to engage with local elected officials and thereby influence the outcome of decisions.
The backbone of Cicero’s functionality is a geographic database for local and state legislative districts. There is no official repository of spatial data on local districts – Avencia obtained the local information for each city individually, through local government websites where possible and directly from municipal officials when necessary. Thus Cicero is now the leading source of spatial information on local legislative districts, currently containing comprehensive data for more than 50 of the largest US cities. It was this large collection of data that enabled Avencia to investigate both local and federal gerrymandering on such a wide scale. For more information on Cicero web services, visit www.azavea.com/cicero