Dartmouth Geography Professor says redistricting controversies soon a thing of the past

Posted 08/07/02

By the time the 2010 census rolls around, Ben Forest believes redistricting controversies like the one recently faced by the Granite State could be nothing more than things of the past.

Forest, an Assistant Professor of Geography, researches the role of geographic information systems (GIS) in the process of legislative redistricting. The advent of sophisticated computer systems in recent decades has inspired a "technological revolution" in the process of electoral redistricting, he says.

"The difficulty the New Hampshire Supreme Court faced was having to work with old data files and boundaries," said Forest. "One of the potential benefits of GIS is that it avoids that problem."

Redistricting GIS have been around for more than ten years, but many states* are still learning how to best use the technology. However, he expects that the multiple uses of GIS, plus the ease with which it creates maps, will be an incentive for states to integrate the systems into their technical infrastructure. Besides redistricting, the systems can assist with land use planning, zoning and tracking environmental data, among other functions.

"Redistricting is 'baby GIS,'" jokes Forest. "It doesn't even begin to push the limits of the current systems.

In his investigations into redistricting, Forest found that southern states are often the most technically sophisticated, perhaps because of past scrutiny regarding district inequities. States that experienced extensive redistricting litigation after the 1990 census also were quicker to implement permanent GIS systems.

So far it appears that the 2001 round of redistricting went more smoothly in states with GIS and resulted in less litigation than in 1991, Forest said.

"It's not just that the technology is more powerful than ten years ago, but the legislative staffs are more adept and skilled using it," he said.

Forest's research also suggests that GIS could produce new power dynamics within state assemblies. For example, Texas made redistricting software easily available to all of its legislators and encouraged lawmakers to come up with their own proposals, thus democratizing a process that had often been carried out by small groups behind closed doors. At the other extreme, some states fear that the relative ease with which GIS technology can create maps will allow assembly members to make endless requests for changes that block agreement on a final plan. In those states, secrecy has actually become a bigger problem with the process, says Forest.

However, GIS will never resolve all the problems of redistricting, as the case in New Hampshire demonstrates.

"New Hampshire is unusual in that it has such a strong tradition of local democracy. Shifting towns between state legislative districts may generate more legitimate concerns here than elsewhere," Forest said. Balancing this concern with the constitutional requirement that districts have equal populations will continue to be a challenge.

As GIS technology takes hold in more and more statehouses, Forest is also looking for potential pitfalls the systems might introduce. For example, GIS gives users the ability to create maps with precisely tailored racial, ethnic or political characteristics. The systems also can work with smaller blocks of information than was possible in the past. Forest was curious whether political parties were exploiting these capabilities to create racially gerrymandered districts that were less obvious visually than maps created in the past.

Although his study didn't find evidence of new forms of racial manipulation, some of the people Forest spoke with speculated that states overplay the degree to which partisanship shaped their districting plans, perhaps in an attempt to hide other motives. "It might not be in the best interests of the state, but partisan gerrymandering is legal, while racial gerrymandering is not," he said. "However, the vast majority of legislators and constituents are mostly concerned with their own district. Once they have a district they're happy with, they don't really look at the rest of the state."