/algo

Analyze electoral data and score every congressional district on how likely/severly it was gerrymandered

Primary LanguagePython

Have I Been Gerrymandered?

https://have-i-been-gerrymandered.github.io/react/

A online web tool to show people how gerrymandered their representative district is

The front end would be a website with a map of the US divided into representative districts. You would be able to zoom and click on a district and see a rating 1-100 on how likely/severely the district was gerrymandered relative to other US districts. Hopefully this score could be segmented into subcategories showing the user how well their district scored on various indicators for gerrymandering and provide a general view of what contributed to the final score. Historical electoral data could be gathered from publicly available data sets and regional polling data from news outlets can be used for more up to date results.

I'd also like to provide a dialog box for participants to put search their district by zip code. This would require data connecting each national zip code to a latitude and longitude value on the map.

Indicators of gerrmandering include but are not limited to:

  • Historical disparities between a states/group of districts' popular vote and electoral outcomes

  • Districts with a relatively slim margin of victory, no blowouts

  • Irregularly shaped districts (might be hard to quantify)

  • Number of "wasted" votes

  • How seemly gerrymandered neighboring districts are

There are plenty of available research papers on how to quantify gerrymandering. I would like to compile a number of these indicators in easy to use web tool. The goal of the project would be to indicate to voters whether their communities have been subjected to partisan redistricting. This could mobilize people to advocate for fair districting at the local level. I feel like people know that gerrymandering is a thing that happens but its hard to tell how severely its effecting the power of their vote. It seems like any push for fair districting would have to come at the local or state level so giving people a close look at their area could be important. Online there are lists of the "most gerrymandered states" and such but I cant find any tool that shows people information on particular districts.