Looking Back at 2020 Redistricting
Now that national redistricting is winding down, we want to share our highlights from the most recent cycle and look ahead at what is to come.
How it started, how it’s going
DistrictBuilder began way back in 2010. Just as it is now, the mission of DistrictBuilder was to create an open-source, web-based map drawing application designed to increase transparency in the drawing of electoral districts and provide a platform for the public to draw their own maps.
Given DistrictBuilder’s success in 2010, we ventured to secure funding from the Sloan Foundation to rebuild the entire application. With support from our academic partners Dr. Micah Altman and Dr. Michael McDonald, Azavea created a brand new application centered around user experience.
Since DistrictBuilder’s relaunch in 2021, over 100,000 maps have been created by over 15,000 people. We’ve supported academics, advocacy organizations, redistricting consultants, grade school students and teachers, government jurisdictions, and map enthusiasts in their efforts to engage the public in the redistricting process. We supported a large community of mappers by hosting training webinars, adding new features, and running a national map drawing competition. We’re pleased to support the democratic process through the public engagement that we’ve witnessed over the last year.
Organization pages
While federal congressional district map drawing is available for free on DistrictBuilder, we offer more specialized redistricting support through our Organization pages. Organizations provide governments, advocacy groups, and academic institutions their own space to create their personal mapping community and engage with the public.
Our first Organization page was launched in Dane County, Wisconsin. Dane County’s Redistricting Commission brought three publicly drawn maps from DistrictBuilder to the clerk’s office for review and final adjustment. Through our partnership with Bear Demographics and Research, a consulting firm in California, we hosted Organization pages for several cities in California. We also worked with Chautauqua County, New York, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Through these partnerships, we learned about how local and state policy shapes the redistricting process of these jurisdictions.
In the good-government advocacy space, we worked with Fair Districts New Jersey to support their mission to reform the state’s redistricting process and were thrilled to assist our first special district, the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District.
Highlights
Our national redistricting competition, Map Across America, aimed to promote a democratic redistricting process and engage the public in electoral district drawing. We received dozens of submissions that were then judged by redistricting experts. Students and mapping enthusiasts from across the country were awarded prizes based on their maps that highlighted partisan fairness, majority-minority district representation, and other criteria. Check out the competition winners here.
In December 2021, we learned that we had won 2nd place in the Open Data for Good Challenge. The challenge was inspired by The Opportunity Project (TOP); a program at the U.S. Census Bureau that is used by federal agencies to catalyze digital tools with open data. The goals of the Open Data for Good Challenge spoke directly to DistrictBuilder’s mission: to provide an open-source software platform and public engagement tool that uses census data in order to support a fair and equitable redistricting process.
Lastly, we are always humbled by the impact stories shared by teachers that use DistrictBuilder in the classroom. DistrictBuilder was used in an American Government class to “show students what really goes into the reapportionment process, as too many people don’t know how the census impacts our Congressional Districts”. Another New York high school used DistrictBuilder to “talk about redistricting and gerrymandering in the context of the current political environment, including the course case in New York”.
Looking Ahead
Just because national redistricting is winding down doesn’t mean you won’t be able to draw maps in DistrictBuilder. Though we won’t be actively developing any new features, we will host and maintain DistrictBuilder so that you can still draw state-level maps. Organization pages will still be available for local redistricting and you can always reach out to us if you are interested in hosting an Organization page for your community.
We still want feedback and suggestions! DistrictBuilder is an open-source product and anyone can develop it on their own if they are passionate about redistricting and software development.
Though redistricting only happens once a decade, it’s important to pay attention to local redistricting efforts happening near you. We look forward to seeing your maps and hearing from you until the next national redistricting cycle.
