Public Redistricting Tool for Texas

[JoaquinGonz]

What problem are you trying to solve?

In every redistricting cycle in the last half-century, Texas has been found to have intentionally discriminated against racial minorities and violated the Voting Rights Act. A federal court finding intentional discrimination in the 2011 process highlighted “[t]he exclusion of minority member and public input despite the minority population growth, the misleading information, the secrecy and closed process, and the rushed process.” This typical closed-door process with backroom deals between politicians undermines Democracy. Instead of voters picking politicians, you end up with politicians picking their voters. In the past, the highly technical and resource-intensive nature of drawing legislative maps has compounded the lack of transparency and public participation. In considering whether to take the extraordinary step of putting Texas under federal supervision, a court recently admonished that “given the record produced in 2011, the State must implement a process that, by any reasonable definition, is ‘fair and open.’ . . . Texas would be well advised to conduct its redistricting process openly, with the understanding that consideration of bail-in is always an option for whatever federal court or courts may be tasked with review of future legislative actions.’”

This project would seek to take existing open-source resources and develop user-friendly Texas-specific applications to facilitate participation in the 2021 redistricting process. The main components would be tools for analyzing legislative map proposals and make comments and suggested amendments, as well as tools for individuals and community organizations to submit their own regional district schemes.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from your project?

All Texans will benefit from a more transparent and inclusive redistricting process. The most direct beneficiaries will be community organizations and individuals we work with to develop map proposals and offer critiques of proposals offered by legislators. Individuals with their own interest in the issues and technological resources will also directly benefit from the applications. Part of the ultimate implementation of this project will include working directly with traditionally technologically under-served communities to ensure they have a voice in a process that has historically disregarded them.

What other resources/tools are currently serving the same need? How does your project set itself apart?

Although there are some open source repositories with the base components of mapping and analysis tools, there is no freely available Texas-specific application that allows individuals to meaningfully interact with maps or create their own. Districtr allows users to draw Texas federal congressional districts based on 2010 census data, but does not allow users to draw state legislative districts and it is unclear that the site will be updated in real time as new census data is made available. This project will also work directly with the Texas Legislative Council to ensure that there is the ability to seamlessly take legislative mapping proposals as they are produced and deploy them on this public platform with analysis tools.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

http://www.districtbuilder.org/
https://districtr.org/
http://gardow.com/davebradlee/redistricting/default.html

What help do you need now?

Initial help identifying the most promising technologies, and identifying specific needs in terms of skillets and resources.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Finding team members with technical expertise to identify more concrete next steps.

How can we contact you outside of Github(list social media or places you're present)?

joaquin@texascivilrightsproject.org

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Project management

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