Alec Ramsay – Medium

Published in DRA 2020

·Jun 16

Apportionment & Redistricting

How have apportionment and redistricting changed the congressional landscape? The new maps suggest a very small net gain for Democrats, but with re-apportionment still shy of even net proportional. Moreover, an approximate national balance obscures offsetting maps in a handful of states that are more unfair. Details The table below…

Redistricting

2 min read

Published in DRA 2020

·Jan 31

Using DRA Repositories

This note describes how to setup public DRA repositories. The directions below assume: You have a terminal window open and have changed directories to where the repositories will be located locally, and You have git installed vtd_data To use this precinct-by-precinct data, first clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/dra2020/vtd_data Then download…

1 min read

Published in DRA 2020

·Jan 24

Multi-Member Districts

Because congressional districts are required by Federal law to use them and most state legislatures use them as well, single-member districts (SMD) are the default when creating maps in DRA. …

2 min read

Published in DRA 2020

·Jan 23

Coloring Precincts By Partisan Swing

You can now color precincts by the “swing” in the two-party vote share between two elections (or election composites). To analyze how partisan lean has changed between elections, click on the Swing option in the Colors pane on the left.

2 min read

Published in DRA 2020

·Jan 12

Doing Research With DRA

This post outlines how you can use DRA for research & analysis. Analyzing Maps in DRA You can analyze maps in DRA using using a suite of tools available on the Statistics, Analyze, Compare, Advanced tabs. The analytics use a rich set of shapes, census, demographic, and election data in DRA (see About Data)…

2 min read

Published in DRA 2020

·Dec 16, 2021

Managing Colors

You’ve always been able to manually change an individual district’s color in Map Settings. Now we’ve added rich support for alternate palettes for district colors as well demographic and partisan coloring including several CVD-friendly choices. Choosing District Colors When Creating a New Map When you create a new map, we now default to new Jet palette. There is…

2 min read

Published in DRA 2020

·Nov 16, 2021

Working With Groups

The Groups feature in DRA 2020 gives you the ease of sharing that you get by Publish-ing maps but restricted to a membership-based group — in effect, private publishing. …

5 min read

Published in DRA 2020

·Oct 9, 2021

Ratings: Deep Dive

On the Analyze tab in DRA, we rate five key dimensions of redistricting maps: proportionality, competitiveness, opportunity for minority representation, compactness, and splitting. The ratings use a scale of [0–100] where bigger is always better. Together these create a radar or spider chart Ratings Diagram which allows you to quickly…

7 min read

Published in DRA 2020

·Oct 1, 2021

What’s Going On With Splitting?

Oy! Sorry for the churn on splitting ratings for state legislative maps. If you’re drawing or evaluating state legislative maps and using the splitting ratings, please read this. If you’re only drawing & evaluating congressional maps or you’re ignoring splitting ratings, you can skip this. TL;DR — We’re reverting how…

3 min read

Published in DRA 2020

·Sep 23, 2021

Re-scoring Unpublished Maps

Now that the official 2020 census data is out, we have re-scored all the published 2020 maps so that they’re all rated with the latest data & compared apples to apples (e.g., for Notable Maps). Only Published maps are candidates for the Notable Maps on the state pages. When you…

1 min read