White Paper

A few years ago, Azavea (formerly Avencia) created a product, Cicero that enables organizations to rapidly match addresses to local, state and national legislative districts, find contact information for elected officials and create maps of districts. The software is used for advocacy, political action, reporting and many other purposes. The system is based on geographic data, so Azavea spent a lot of time tracking down legislative boundaries for locations all over the United States and then, later, other parts of the world.

One of the things Azavea observed was that the home of their main office, Philadelphia, had what appeared to be some of the craziest council districts in the country. They wondered just how crazy they really were. So they started doing some research on metrics for assessing the degree to which a given district might be gerrymandered. This led to their first Gerrymandering Index White Paper in fall of 2006, in which they assessed both Congressional and local districts. It was well received both locally and nationally and contributed to a conversation in Philadelphia about how both the districts and the system might be changed.

Now, three years later, Azavea's Cicero product has been extended to include more cities, state legislatures and other countries, so they decided to take another crack at the white paper, this time in the context of the 2010 Census and 2011 redistricting process. The "Redrawing the Map on Redistricting 2010: A National Study" white paper and the "Redrawing the Map on Redistricting 2010: The Philadelphia Study" white paper are the results. For both white papers Azavea has added more cities, included upper and lower state legislative chambers, added more metrics and-to top it all off-made the whole thing available as an interactive, web-based tool - on both the Redistricting the Nation web site and its regional web site Redistricting the Philadelphia Region