News

The Minnesota Supreme Court has issued an order that they will consider redistricting plans generated by the Public Mapping software, which is being used in the Minnesota redistricting competition. To our knowledge, this is the first time a court has stated they will consider public plans.

Draw Our Minnesota is an effort to improve the redistricting process in Minnesota by ensuring that the process is fair, transparent and that there is meaningful citizen input.  Past redistricting attempts in Minnesota have been driven by partisan influences and lacked active citizen participation in the process.

Amazon Machine Instances pre-loaded with Florida and Georgia data are now available through Amazon Web Services. Follow these instructions to run your own site.

Our software developer partner, Azavea, has launched a redistricting competition for Philadelphia's City Council districts. Competition partners include Newsworks, University of Pennsylvania Project for Civic Engagement, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com.

The Ohio Redistricting Competition is now underway. State legislative plans are to be submitted for judging by August 21 and congressional plans are to be submitted by September 11. For more information, visit the Ohio Redistricting Competition.

Dr. McDonald will discuss the Public Mapping Project at a Brookings Institution forum at 10am on Monday, July 18th. C-SPAN is live-broadcasting the forum.

The Sloan Foundation has awarded the Public Mapping Project a grant of $380K to provide full public access to a New York version of District Builder. To further engage the public, the grant will support five redistricting public forums around the state, to be run by Prof. Costas Panagopolous at Fordham University. The grant will also support the development of integrated user support and internationalization and localization features, such a content delivered in multiple languages and the ability to simultaneously support statewide and local redistricting.

We are pleased to announce that we have issued Amazon Machine Instances for Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

Note: this post corrects for a Nevada data error pointed out by a helpful reader.

We've posted selected 2010 census statistics for all the current (pre-redistricted) congressional and state legislative districts in the country. You can obtain the reports for any individual state by following the state links at http://www.publicmapping.org/resources/state-resources and then following the "Current Districts" link.

Highlights

The average district is overpopulated by 0.06% from the ideal population for its legislative chamber. The average African-American majority VAP district is under-populated by 12.21% and the average Latino majority VAP district is under-populated by 3.2%. The African-American statistics conform with the population estimates leading into the 2010 census, but under-population of the Latino districts comes as a bit of a surprise given that the community is the fastest growing in the country. What this tells us is that the Latino community growth is not in the existing communities. Demographers that I have spoken with attribute the decline in the African-American communities to two factors: children leaving home and gentrification. In all, these statistics may indicate that at least in terms of representation, constituencies are becoming a more racially heterogeneous.  

Biggest Losers

The most under-populated districts are in the Katrina ravaged parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. The top five from most under-populated to least are:

State	District	Total Population	Ideal Population	Deviation	Percent Deviation	% Black Voting-Age Population	% Hispanic Voting-Age Population
LA	State House District 99	16,419	43,175	-26,756	-62.0%	79.40%	2.90%
LA	State House District 104	21,315	43,175	-21,860	-50.6%	18.30%	8.30%
LA	State House District 103	23,643	43,175	-19,532	-45.2%	22.10%	9.80%
MS	State House District 115	13,505	24,322	-10,817	-44.5%	24.30%	11.60%
LA	State Senate District 2	65,868	116,240	-50,372	-43.3%	84.30%	3.40%

Biggest Gainers

State	District	Total Population	Ideal Population	Deviation	Percent Deviation	% Black Voting-Age Population	% Hispanic Voting-Age Population
VA	State House District 13	190,620	80,010	110,610	138.2%	10.80%	11.00%
UT	State House District 56	90,503	36,852	53,651	145.6%	0.50%	6.50%
NV	Clark County Senatorial District 9	354,064	128,598	225,466	175.3%	8.40%	13.50%
NV	Assembly District 22	222,912	64,299	158,613	246.7%	6.60%	12.80%
NV	Assembly District 13	256,407	64,299	192,108	298.8%	10.60%	13.40%

Smallest and Biggest Overall

The smallest population district is New Hapshire State House District 3, Coos with a total population of 3,233.

The largest population district is California State Senate District 37 with a total population of 1,215,876.

A spreadsheet of these statistics is available here. If you use these data, please site them as Michael McDonald. 2011. "Legislative Districts' 2010 Census Statistics." Public Mapping Project. http://www.publicmapping.org.