I'm attending the 2004 American Constitution Society Convention this weekend. This morning there was an interesting panel on "Reframing Democracy: Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania and the Redistricting Battles." I wanted to just mention one thing that the panelists mentioned: the increasing use of computer software to redraw voting districts, and the implications thereof.
The panel featured an impressive list of notables:
Michael Carvin, Jones Day
Pamela Karlan, Professor of Law, Stanford University
Ellen Katz, Professor of Law, University of Michigan
Teresa Wynn Roseborough, Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan
Paul Smith, Jenner & Block
Almost every panelist at one point mentioned a piece of software that has become popular in state legislatures: Caliper's Maptitude for Redistricting, which the website advertises as:
a special edition of Caliper Corporation's Maptitude GIS for Windows that includes everything you need to build and analyze redistricting plans. As you assign area features to a district, the district boundaries are redrawn and selected attributes are automatically summarized to reflect the district's characteristics.
Basically, as one of the panelists put it today, Maptitude allows you to do just about anything you want with a redistricting plan, once you plug in the demographic data. You want districts that are as evenly balanced politically/racially/genderly as possible? How about a lot of majority-minority districts? How about districts that will protect incumbents, by filling them with people of the incumbents' political party? Whatever your preferences, Maptitude can generate the appropriate redistricting lines in half an hour or less.
Caliper isn't shy about the incredible number of states (and other entities) that use their software. But what are the implications of this software on redistricting? Basically, Maptitude takes the guesswork out of redistricting. A political party in charge of the state legislature can now, with a remarkable degree of precision ("within a single voter," one panelist said), redraw voting districts so that the districts include any set of voters that the political party wants. This historically unprecedented power is only enhanced by the latitude that states have been given to draw district lines: in Vieth v. Jubelirer, a 2004 Supreme Court decision, at least four justices clearly found the question of redistricting non-justiciable (meaning the federal courts will stay out of redistricting disputes altogether), and Justice Kennedy, who was in the middle of Vieth, doesn't look like he'll join the four dissenters any time soon.
Anyway, the panelists had a lot to say about redistricting in general, but I just wanted to throw out this point about the new technology of redistricting.