Clickstream

BI Tools for Gerrymandering

This excellent article in the New Yorker describes the current redistricting process and the gerrymandering that's taken root. What I found intriguing is the use of Maptitude software from Caliper. By feeding as much census and election data as possible into the software it is possible to point-and-click your way to a safe congressional seat in the next election.

With a few clicks, Persily changed the map from one that showed party registration in each census block to one that revealed voting results in each block. The colors ranged from dark red, for heavily Democratic votes, to dark blue, for strongly Republican. He showed voting results in about two dozen races, from President to governor and from congressman to local offices. "The whole process has got much more sophisticated" Persily went on. "Party-registration data are not the only kind of data you want to use. You want to use real election results. That's a big change from ten years ago. We have become very good at predicting how people are going to vote. People's partisanship is at a thirty-year high. If I know you voted for Gore, I am better able to predict that you are going to vote for any given Democrat in a future election."

The use of Maptitude reminds me of hospital third-party billing software I worked on in the mid-eighties. The primary, secondary and tertiary diagnoses determine the allowable rates for insurance and medicare billing. In general, one combination provides a better total rate than the others. It was illegal for a computer system to determine the ordering, but the person doing the data entry could. So they asked us to write software that would provide every combination of diagnostic combinations and display them with the billing amounts. The user then selected the one that had the highest rate. While not illegal it definitely subverted the intent of the laws at that time.

This redistricting software does much the same thing to the political redistricting process. There was never an intent to let politicians in power redistrict to make it impossible for them to lose elections. Now that computers and good BI software make it as simple to geryymander as clicking a mouse, we need laws that explicitly forbid this practice. The problem is that two thirds of politicians in office hold safe seats because of the subverted process, so it's unlikely that any reform will take place.

I'm also embarrassed to note that my own alma mater (CMU) played a part in the Pennsylvania redistricting that's now in court.

Posted by Mark Friday, December 05, 2003 8:16:00 PM | permalink |