Redistricting for the masses: Cloud software lets voters participate
Why should politicians have all the gerrymandering fun? LA County's cloud service lets voters participate.
By Robert L. Mitchell
May 23, 2011 06:00 AM ET
Computerworld - As the 2010 U.S. census results arrived in March, 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
geographic information system (GIS) technology well enough to game them.
"Redistricting is an extraordinarily important process in terms of who has a political voice, but it's an extraordinarily elitist field," says John Kim, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group based in Los Angeles.
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. Hosted by GIS vendor
Esri, the application lets voters view and modify existing maps and boundaries, submit comments, and even create and submit their own plans from scratch.
Users have access not just to maps with political boundaries, but to geo-coded census and county voting data as well, all of which can be tabulated and displayed over a district map as a table or graph. Or, if they already have a GIS and redistricting software, they can download the data.
"The county wants to promote the widest practicable citizen involvement in the redistricting process," says Martin Zimmerman, assistant CEO for LA County.
