TECH IN THE TIME OF REDISTRICTING: Over the years, technology has made redistricting easier and more precise.

• Author: Adler, William
• Position: ELECTIONS AND REDISTRICTING

Redistricting in the 1980s was laborious, imprecise and--viewed from a 2022 perspective-stunningly low-tech. And judging from a description by mapping consultant Kimball Brace, it was not a suitable activity for anyone afraid of heights.

While redistricting Illinois in the 1981 round, Brace hung maps on the two-story walls of me minority leader's office, overlaid them with lung rolls of acetate, and climbed up on ladders to draw district lines with magic markers. Each night, staffers would code the map onto thousands of punch cards and run the cards through a computer mainframe. The next day, they would pick up the computer-generated reports and tweak the map as necessary. At mat time, however, most states did not incorporate computers into the redistricting process at all.

Over the next 40 years, redistricting became entirely computerized. Legislators and their staffs have reaped the benefits, saving time and money, and drawing maps that better achieve dieir goals. Technology has also enabled greater transparency, as journalists and members of the public can now easily analyze maps and even draw their own with free software.

Public participation infrastructure, such as freely available software and data, allows meaningful public input, says Micah Airman, co-founder of the Public Mapping Project. "When the public is allowed to draw plans, they look a lot different than partisan plans."

Redistricting commissions have been the main way the public can have a voice in the process, Altman says. "Where commissions have been designed to be effective--and haven't been disabled through lawsuits or extreme politics--we definitely see differences in their plans."

But despite the availability of excellent free online tools, most states have a long way to go in incorporating public input into maps. Some independent redistricting commissions appear to have mostly ignored public comment--and some legislatures appear to have ignored the input of redistricting commissions. "There are a lot of ways to make a commission ineffective, either by design or after the fact," Altman says.

Redistricting Timeline

1960-1971

A series of watershed Supreme Court decisions created the first numerical constraint on district maps: the requirement that districts have equal population. Despite this new requirement, though, only a few states used computers in the 1971 round of redistricting.

Linda Meggers, then a graduate student offering technical expertise to the Georgia...