Brookings: Experts - Micah Altman

Toward Public Participation in Redistricting

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:00:00 -0500

Event Information

January 20, 2011
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

The drawing of legislative district boundaries is among the most self-interested and least transparent systems in American democratic governance. All too often, formal redistricting authorities maintain their control by imposing high barriers to transparency and to public participation in the process. Reform advocates believe that opening that process to the public could lead to different outcomes and better representation.

On January 20, Brookings hosted a briefing to review how redistricting in the 50 states will unfold in the months ahead and present a number of state-based initiatives designed to increase transparency and public participation in redistricting. Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellows Micah Altman and Michael McDonald unveiled open source mapping software which enables users to create and submit their own plans, based on current census and historical election data, to redistricting authorities and to disseminate them widely. Such alternative public maps could offer viable input to the formal redistricting process.

After each presentation, participants took audience questions.

Learn more about Michael McDonald's Public Mapping Project »

Video

Transcript

Event Materials

Participants

Panelists

Tim Storey

Senior Fellow
National Conference of State Legislatures

Clare Dyer

Manager, Mapping and Redistricting Section
Texas Legislative Council

Moderator: Norman Ornstein

Resident Scholar
American Enterprise Institute

Cindi Canary

Director, Illinois Campaign for Political Reform

Derek Cressman

Regional Director of State Operations for Western States
Common Cause

Quentin Kidd

Associate Professor
Christopher Newport University

Nancy Tate

Executive Director
The League of Women Voters of the United States

Pulling Back the Curtain on Redistricting

Micah Altman and Michael P. McDonald — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:23:00 -0400

Every 10 years — unfortunately, sometimes more frequently — legislative district lines are redrawn to balance population for demographic changes revealed by the census. What goes on is much more than a simple technical adjustment of boundaries, with ramifications that largely escape public notice.

Politicians often use redistricting as an opportunity to cut unfavorable constituents and potential challengers out of their districts. Barack Obama, for example, learned the rough and tumble of redistricting politics when Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) carved Obama's Chicago home out of Rush's congressional district after losing a 2000 primary challenge to Obama, then a state senator.

Incumbents can also use redistricting to move favorable constituents into their districts. Obama himself used the state legislative redistricting to extend his predominantly African American district north into a wealthy area of Illinois known as the Gold Coast. This new constituency allowed Obama to hone an effective biracial campaigning style that served him well when he ran for the U.S. Senate and the presidency.

Critically, these decisions are made with little or no public input or accountability. While Arizona and California are among the few states that give the public a chance to see and participate in how the boundaries are set, by using open redistricting commissions, most states gerrymander legislative lines behind closed doors. Figures from both major parties tilt the electoral playing field so much that one party is essentially assured of winning a given district, controlling the state legislature or winning the most seats in the state's congressional delegation. In other words, the democratic process is subverted. In this system, politicians select voters rather than voters electing politicians.

A 2006 Pew survey found that 70 percent of registered voters had no opinion about congressional redistricting. Among the few that expressed an opinion, some mistook the question to be about school districts rather than congressional districts.

For many reasons it has been hard to fault the public. An immense amount of population data must be sifted and then assembled, much like a giant jigsaw puzzle, to ensure that districts satisfy complex federal requirements relating to equal population and the Voting Rights Act, and varying state requirements that may include compactness and respect for existing political boundaries or communities. And access to these data and the software necessary to assemble and analyze them have long been out of public reach.

In the previous round of redistricting, according to a 2002 survey of authorities we conducted with our colleague Karin Mac Donald, most states did not provide any tools, facilities, dedicated assistance or software to support the public in developing redistricting plans. Many states failed to provide even minimal transparency by making data available, providing information about their plans online or accepting publicly submitted plans. Many redistricting authorities have not made firm plans to support transparency or public participation in the current round of redistricting.

In the coming year, however, technological advancements will enable anyone with a Web browser and an interest in how he or she is represented to draw district maps of his or her community and state that meet the same requirements as official submissions. Under the direction of scholars at the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, and with consultation from an array of experts in redistricting issues, we have developed a set of principles for transparency and public participation. These principles have been endorsed by an array of stakeholders, including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters of the United States.

Americans will be able to participate directly in their democracy by offering plans to be compared with the politician-drawn maps. The public and even the courts will no longer have to accept that whatever is devised by politicians in the backroom.

The Wizard of Oz appeared powerful because he hid behind a curtain -- until it was pulled back. The time has come to pull back the curtain on redistricting. A good place to start is by passing Rep. John Tanner's Redistricting Transparency Act, which has 38 co-sponsors from both parties. If Congress will not act, state governments can follow the lead of the few states that provide for meaningful transparency and public participation. Failure to provide for transparency and public participation should be recognized for what it is: an obviously self-serving act, placing the interests of politicians above the public interest.

Authors

Publication: The Washington Post

Image Source: © Joel Page / Reuters

Principles for Transparency and Public Participation in Redistricting

Micah Altman , Thomas E. Mann, Michael P. McDonald and Norman J. Ornstein — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:21:00 -0400

Scholars from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute are collaborating to promote transparency in redistricting. In January 2010, an advisory board of experts and representatives of good government groups was convened in order to articulate principles for transparent redistricting and to identify barriers to the public and communities who wish to create redistricting plans. This document summarizes the principles for transparency in redistricting that were identified during that meeting.

Benefits of a Transparent, Participative Redistricting Process

The drawing of electoral districts is among the most easily manipulated and least transparent systems in democratic governance. All too often, redistricting authorities maintain their monopoly by imposing high barriers to transparency and public participation. Increasing transparency and public participation can be a powerful counterbalance by providing the public with information similar to that which is typically only available to official decision makers, which can lead to different outcomes and better representation.

Increasing transparency can empower the public to shape the representation for their communities, promote public commentary and discussion about redistricting, inform legislators and redistricting authorities which district configurations their constituents and the public support, and educate the public about the electoral process.

Fostering public participation can enable the public to identify their neighborhoods and communities, promote the creation of alternative maps, and facilitate an exploration of a wide range of representational possibilities. The existence of publicly-drawn maps can provide a measuring stick against which an official plan can be compared, and promote the creation of a “market” for plans that support political fairness and community representational goals.

Transparency Principles

All redistricting plans should include sufficient information so the public can verify, reproduce, and evaluate a plan. Transparency thus requires that:

Redistricting plans must be available in non-proprietary formats.
Redistricting plans must be available in a format allowing them to be easily read and analyzed with commonly-used geographic information software.
The criteria used as a basis for creating plans and individual districts must be clearly documented.

Creating and evaluating redistricting plans and community boundaries requires access to demographic, geographic, community, and electoral data. Transparency thus requires that:

All data necessary to create legal redistricting plans and define community boundaries must be publicly available, under a license allowing reuse of these data for non-commercial purposes.
All data must be accompanied by clear documentation stating the original source, the chain of ownership (provenance), and all modifications made to it.

Software systems used to generate or analyze redistricting plans can be complex, impossible to reproduce, or impossible to correctly understand without documentation. Transparency thus requires that:

Software used to automatically create or improve redistricting plans must be either open-source or provide documentation sufficient for the public to replicate the results using independent software.
Software used to generate reports that analyze redistricting plans must be accompanied by documentation of data, methods, and procedures sufficient for the reports to be verified by the public.

Services offered to the public to create or evaluate redistricting plans and community boundaries are often opaque and subject to misinterpretation unless adequately documented. Transparency thus requires that:

Software necessary to replicate the creation or analysis of redistricting plans and community boundaries produced by the service must be publicly available.
The service must provide the public with the ability to make available all published redistricting plans and community boundaries in non-proprietary formats that are easily read and analyzed with commonly-used geographic information software.
Services must provide documentation of any organizations providing significant contributions to their operation.

Promoting Public Participation

New technologies provide opportunities to broaden public participation in the redistricting process. These technologies should aim to realize the potential benefits described and be consistent with the articulated transparency principles.

Redistricting is a legally and technically complex process. District creation and analysis software can encourage broad participation by: being widely accessible and easy to use; providing mapping and evaluating tools that help the public to create legal redistricting plans, as well as maps identifying local communities; be accompanied by training materials to assist the public to successfully create and evaluate legal redistricting plans and define community boundaries; have publication capabilities that allow the public to examine maps in situations where there is no access to the software; and promoting social networking and allow the public to compare, exchange and comment on both official and community-produced maps.

Official Endorsement from Organizations – Americans for Redistricting Reform, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, Campaign Legal Center, Center for Governmental Studies, Center for Voting and Democracy, Common Cause, Demos, and the League of Women Voters of the United States.

Attending board members – Nancy Bekavac, Director, Scientists and Engineers for America; Derek Cressman, Western Regional Director of State Operations, Common Cause; Anthony Fairfax, President, Census Channel; Representative Mike Fortner (R), Illinois General Assembly; Karin Mac Donald, Director, Statewide Database, Berkeley Law, University of California, Berkeley; Leah Rush, Executive Director, Midwest Democracy Network; Mary Wilson, President, League of Women Voters.

Editors – Micah Altman, Harvard University and the Brookings Institution; Thomas E. Mann, Brookings Institution; Michael P. McDonald, George Mason University and the Brookings Institution; Norman J. Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute.

This project is funded by a grant from the Sloan Foundation to the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.

Authors

Publication: The Brookings Institution and The American Enterprise Institute