Friday, June 12, 2009

6 More States for Free Redistricting Tool

Just a quick diary here to let you know I've enabled 6 more states (as of last weekend) for my free redistricting web application. They are Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, North Carolina and South Carolina. Next I plan to tackle PA and NY, which are time consuming because of the large amount of data. Thank you for your feedback on my previous diary a couple of weeks ago. Open Redistricting was one of the top feedback items. I've talked to Travis Crum, the person who proposed the Open Redistricting Project (via a Heather Gerken post on Balkanization -- my bad crediting Ms. Gerken) and we are exploring how to collaborate. So stay tuned. Getting political data was also quite popular, but I haven't figured out how to do this consistently. It may end up being part of Open Redistricting, where different individuals can contribute that data in some way. Another item from your feedback is to include a way to prepopulate with current CDs. That should not be too hard to do, so I will try to add that feature in a month or so. You may have already seen this, but andgarden at Swing State did a nice NJ redistricting map. Quick not on the 2008 population estimates. The Census Bureau gives those out by county. I take the additional population (or population loss) for each demographic group and distribute across the census blocks (really census block groups) in the county comensurate with the size of those demographic groups in each block. So it's as if the population grew by the same percentage in each census block. I also make sure that every additional person is the data is accounted for by taking any left over by rounding and adjusting the largest census block accordingly. Cross posted at Daily Kos. Thanks.