Political Mapping Process Is Redrawn

Redistricting, the decennial rite of adjusting congressional and legislative boundaries, used to be such an arcane process that California legislators once hired rocket scientists with mainframe computers to help them draw the maps.

Today, virtually anyone with an average Pentium-powered desktop and an above-average interest in politics can design voting districts faster and more accurately than anything a mainframe could generate just a decade ago.

The advance in technology is leading to an unprecedented number of proposals and counterproposals in a battle for political turf as states redraw their districts this year. Citizen groups, long dependent on the political parties’ proposals, are for the first time able to make quick, specific demands.

Political parties used to dismiss such groups by claiming to be the only source of authoritative data, said Bruce Cain, director of the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. “They would say, ‘You can’t do this because the numbers don’t add up.’ Now you can’t bluff your way. Someone will check.”

And checking they are, faster than ever.

In Texas last month, a day after a Republican-dominated Legislative Redistricting Board passed a plan that effectively assured GOP dominance of the state House and Senate, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a lawsuit to block the map.

The group, representing a coalition of Latino organizations that had unveiled its own redistricting plan two months before, argued that only 23% of the districts on the board’s map had majorities of voting-age Latinos, while 28% of voting-age Texans are Latino.

Such a quick and precise retort would have been impossible 10 years ago.

“In 1991, we were drawing maps with colored pencils on huge Triple-A maps,” said Zachary Gonzalez, a redistricting coordinator for the William C. Velasquez Institute, a voting rights organization and member of the coalition.

Most experts doubt the new tools will lead to tangible gains for the new combatants. Yet the technology has the potential to create a richer, more democratic debate. It allows anyone with a bit of training to dissect districts into a multitude of profiles while calculating the results almost instantly: Move a district boundary to include an extra block and a district becomes majority Latino. Exclude another neighborhood and you almost assure a Republican victory.

Hundreds of scenarios have been playing out on computer screens in redistricting workshops sponsored by interest groups and public agencies around the country. The results will be hitting legislatures, and sometimes courtrooms, as states wrap up their redistricting rounds before next year’s elections.

“People are just in awe about the amount of information we are able to present in a [computer] map,” said Priya Sridharan, a voting rights attorney for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles.

The group has met with Asian American activists around California, laptops in hand, gathering input for the legal center’s first proposed statewide map of congressional, Assembly and Senate districts.

Other groups such as MALDEF and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, veterans of redistricting battles, are using the technology to produce a record number of proposals.

“I’m cranking them out,” said Sam Walters, a redistricting coordinator for the NAACP in Baltimore. “I drew congressional districts for the state of Arkansas in four hours. That would be unheard of 10 years ago.”

The stakes are high. With Republicans holding a slim margin in the U.S. House of Representatives, the major parties are battling for every iota of advantage in next year’s elections. Lawmakers facing term limits are carving themselves favorable districts in other political bodies. Latino and Asian groups want to capitalize on their substantial population growth, and African Americans are aiming to protect the gains they made in the last decade.

Redistricting software costs $2,500 to $3,500. In some parts of the country, public officials have made the tools available free. In Illinois, legislators and citizens alike can walk into one of two redistricting computer centers, one Republican and one Democratic, to analyze and draw maps.

In California, all the data necessary to draw districts such as current electoral boundaries, census figures and past election results can be downloaded from the Institute for Governmental Studies’ Web site, https://swdb.berkeley.edu/.

“There will be informed stakeholders,” said Allan Hoffenblum, publisher of “The Target Book,” a guide to California politics. “And they will know the ramifications of the [redistricting] bills right away.”

Redistricting, which follows each census, has long been an obscure process reserved mostly for party leaders and their high-priced consultants. The ruling party in each state drafted and forced the plans through along partisan lines.

The task of processing census data into political geography used to be so monumental that two decades ago, Cain, then a consultant hired by the California Assembly, sought assistance from Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The NASA center had one of the few computers in the country with GIS, or geographic information systems, technology. The software allows users to draw maps and calculate the impact of boundaries on everything from natural resources to military troops--and now voters.

Today’s computers pack more processing power than a roomful of old mainframes. Census data for an entire state fit onto a single compact disc, and the Internet moves megabytes in milliseconds.

Some analysts predict that an already contentious process will become even more raucous as the ability to draw lines, if not the power to impose them, spreads. The ultimate effect, however, will depend on traditional politics. Redistricting disputes often wind up in the courts, and the new technology may lead to more of that.

Activists are watching, computers and lawyers at the ready.

“After the public gestures of listening, the politicians go behind the doors,” said Kathy Seng, project director for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. “Whether we will end up being able to have true input can only be judged at the back end.”