White Paper

A few years ago, we 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 works based on geographic data, so we spent a lot of time tracking down lots of legislative boundaries for the United States and then, later, other parts of the world.

One of the things we observed was that the home of our main office, Philadelphia, had what appeared to be some of the craziest council districts in the country. We wondered just how crazy they really were. So we started doing some research on metrics for assessing the degree to which a given district might be gerrymandered. This led to our Gerrymandering White Paper in fall of 2006, in which we 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, our Cicero product has been extended to include more cities, state legislatures and other countries, so we decided to take a fresh look at the process of political redistricting, this time in the context of the 2010 Census and the 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 we have 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