Click here to read MAPLight.org's press release.
Avencia Incorporated, a Philadelphia-based geospatial software design and development company, has partnered with MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, to generate an extensive series of maps for MAPLight.org’s ground-breaking ‘Remote Control’ report that illuminates the connection between money, geography and politics. The maps clearly show the geographic origin, down to Congressional district of in-district and out-of-district campaign contributions (from 2005-2007) to all members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The study found that U.S. House members raised 79% of campaign contributions from outside their voters’ districts and that 91 members raised 90% or more from out-of-district. Of the top 20 zip codes contributing to U.S. House members, 15 are in the Washington DC metropolitan area. In other words, legislators raised about 4 out of every 5 dollars in campaign funds from outside of where their constituents live.
To come to this conclusion, MAPLight.org used campaign contribution data that was compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) and is based on reports that candidates and contributors are required to file with the Federal Elections Commission. Avencia then geocoded the street address of each contributor, assigning it specific geographic coordinates, which were then used to determine the House district in which it originated. MAPLight.org examined contributions to 421 House members: all House members who were currently serving as of October 15, 2008, excluding House members who were elected or appointed after November 2006, members who lost primaries prior to June 1, 2008 and members from the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.
Utilizing a combination of ESRI’s ArcMap ModelBuilder technology and custom software, Avencia created a set of tools to quickly generate over 400 maps --- a process that, if performed manually, would likely have taken several weeks -- that illustrate the study. These maps use graduated symbols to illuminate the relative amounts of money received from each House district in comparison to the contributions received from the legislator’s home district. To read more about the MAPLight.org study outcomes, visit the MAPLight.org website.
In this current election cycle, Avencia has consulted on several high-profile elections and voter anlaysis projects with a variety of organizations with a focus on state and local elections. Cicero, Avencia's legislative district boundary and elected official web API, matches constituent locations with their local, state, and national representatives by tapping into a extensive database of voting district maps and information about politicians, legislative bodies, and election events. In 2006 Avencia released a study of gerrymandering in the United States, showing that Philadelphia topped in Gerrymandering practices. Furthermore, to help grassroots campaigns hit the ground running, Avencia has also developed tools to quickly generate hundreds of canvassing maps that pinpoint likely voters and supervoters in each precinct. Their DecisionTree web-based geographic planning and prioritization tool is also used to build a prototype Elections and Advocacy application to enable campaigns to prioritize canvassing and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts based on a selection of over 30 weighted electoral indicators including voting history, demographic data, and civic participation. Avencia is also helping congressional campaigns improve fund-raising efforts by analyzing donor patterns and demographics as well as using innovative Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) tools to predict election outcomes based on a range of variables. Finally, on November 4, Avencia will continue its work with the Committee of Seventy, one of the oldest non-partisan political watchdog groups in the U.S., tracking election-day incidents on a real-time interactive web application that displays a map of election incidents as they are reported.