Crowd-Sourced Mapping for Open Government

Crowd-Sourced Mapping for Open Government

Prepared for

MIT Libraries Informatics Program Brown Bag Talk

December 2013


Dr. Micah Altman<[email protected]>

Director of Research, MIT Libraries


DISCLAIMERThese opinions are my own, they are not the opinions of MIT, Brookings, any of the project funders, nor (with the exception of co-authored previously published work) my collaborators

Secondary disclaimer:

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future!”

-- Attributed to Woody Allen, Yogi Berra, Niels Bohr, Vint Cerf, Winston Churchill, Confucius, Disreali [sic], Freeman Dyson, Cecil B. Demille, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Edgar R.

Fiedler, Bob Fourer, Sam Goldwyn, Allan Lamport, Groucho Marx, Dan Quayle, George Bernard Shaw, Casey Stengel, Will Rogers, M. Taub, Mark Twain, Kerr L. White, etc.


Collaborators & Co-Conspirators

• Michael P. McDonald, George Mason University

• Research Support Thanks to the the Sloan Foundation, the

Joyce Foundation, the Judy Ford Watson Center for Public Policy, Amazon Corporation


Related Work• Altman, Micah, and Michael P McDonald (2014) “Paradoxes of Political Reform:

Congressional Redistricting in Florida”, in Jigsaw Politics in the Sunshine State, University Press of Florida. Forthcoming.

• Altman, Micah, and Michael P McDonald. (2014) “Public Participation GIS : The Case of Redistricting.” Proceedings of the 47th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Computer Society Press (IEEE).

• Micah Altman, Michael P McDonald (2013) “A Half-Century of Virginia Redistricting Battles: Shifting from Rural Malapportionment to Voting Rights to Public Participation”. Richmond Law Review.

• Micah Altman, Michael P McDonald (2012) Redistricting Principles for the Twenty-First Century, 1-26. In Case-Western Law Review 62 (4).

• Micah Altman, Michael P. McDonald (2012) Technology for Public Participation in Redistricting. In Redistricting and Reapportionment in the West, Lexington Press.

• Altman, M., & McDonald, M. P. (2011). The Dawn of Do-It-Yourself Redistricting ? Campaigns & Elections, (January), 38-42

• Michael Altman, Michael P McDonald (2011) BARD: Better automated redistricting, 1-28. In Journal Of Statistical Software 42 (4).

• Micah Altman, M MCDONALD (2010) The Promise and Perils of Computers in Redistricting, 69–159. In Duke J Const Law Pub Policy

Most reprints available from:informatics.mit.edu

http://informatics.mit.edu/


This Talk

• Political Boundary Mapping & Open Government

• Building a Platform for Crowd-SourcedPolitical Boundary Mapping

• Are Publicly Created Maps Different?• Future R&D


Political Boundary Mapping

Definitions?Electoral Boundary Delimitation. The aim of electoral boundary delimitation is to assign people to equipopulous geographical districts from which they will elect representatives, in order to reflect communities of interest and to improve representation.

Gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is a form of political boundary delimitation, or redistricting, in which the boundaries are selected to produce an outcome that is improperly favorable to some group. The name “gerrymander” was first used by the Boston Gazette in 1812 to describe the shape of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Ger- ry’s redistricting plan, in which one district was said to have resembled a salamander.


Maybe Use a Computer?“In summary, elimination of gerrymandering would seem to require the establishment of an automatic and impersonal procedure for carrying out a redistricting. It appears to be not at all difficult to devise rules for doing this which will produce results not markedly inferior to those which would be arrived at by a genuinely disinterested commission.” -- [Vickrey 1961]

“The purpose of this Article is … to describe a simple and politically feasible computer program which can reapportion a legislature or other body of people who represent geographical districts. …The redistricting program proposed is designed to implement the value judgments of those responsible for reapportionment”– [Nagel 1965]

“There is only one way to do reapportionment — feed into the computer all the factors except political registration.” - Ronald Reagan [Goff 1973]

“The rapid advances in computer technology and education during the last two decades make it relatively simple to draw contiguous districts of equal population [and] at the same time to further whatever secondary goals the State has.” - Justice Brennan, in Karcher v. Daggett (1983)

“Let a computer do it”-Washington Post, 2003 ( And many, many blogs)

“Until recently only political parties had the manpower and the tools to redraw boundaries while keeping districts equal in population. Now anybody can play this game, at least as a kibitzer. For as little as $3,500 the geographic analysis firm Caliper Corp. will let you have the software and census data you need to try out novel geometries on a PC screen. Harvard researcher Micah Altman and others have put together a program that draws compact districts. His software is free.

Democratic redistricting could work like this. After a census, a commission in each state entertains proposals from the political parties and any do-gooder group or individual willing to compete. The commission picks the most compact solution, according to some simple criterion. (Say, add up the miles of boundary lines, giving any segments that track municipal borders a 50% discount, and go for the shortest total.) The mathematical challenge might inspire some gifted amateurs to weigh in.” – William Baldwin, Forbes 2008


(Parker 1990)

Two ChallengesIt’s hard.(Optimal delimitation with simple criteria is NP-hard [Altman 1997])

Neutral criteria, aren’t.

Trends in computing use for boundary delimitation?

1960-70• Research

systems, demos

1980• First

production use

1990• Common use

of GIS for congressional boundaries

• GIS = Decision Support

• Professional Only

• Bespoke systems

2000• Web –

disseminate government information

• Ubiquitous GIS on desktop


Source: Altman, MacDonald, McDonald 2005

What’s next?

2010• Web/GIS “2.0”• Transparency• Public Engagement

2020 • ???• AI tools for

computer-aided boundary

• Public Government Collaboration?

• Social collaboration?• “CAD” tools?



Building a Platform

Public Mapping Project Goals

• Identify principles for transparency and public participation in redistricting

• Enable the public to draw maps of the communities and redistricting plans for their states– Facilitate public input to process– Inform the public debate– Provide maps for courts where litigation occurs


Principles for Transparency

All redistricting plans should include sufficient information such that the public can verify, reproduce, and evaluate a plan Proposed redistricting plans should be publicly available in non-proprietary formats. Public redistricting services should provide the public with the ability to make available all published

redistricting plans and community boundaries in non-proprietary formats. Public redistricting services must provide documentation of any organizations providing significant contributions to their

operation. All demographic, electoral and geographic data necessary to create legal redistricting plans and define community

boundaries should be publicly available, under a license allowing reuse of these data for non-commercial purposes.

The criteria used to evaluate plans and districts should be documented. Software used to automatically create or improve redistricting plans should be either open-source or provide

documentation sufficient for the public to replicate the results using independent software. Software used to generate reports that analyze redistricting plans should be accompanied by documentation of data,

methods, and procedures sufficient for the reports to be verified by the public. Software necessary to replicate the creation or analysis of redistricting plans and community boundaries produced by the

service must be publicly available.


Supporting a Public Mapping Workflow -- Initial Features

• Create– Create districts and plans

• Evaluate– Visualize– Summarize

• Population balance• Geographic compactness• Completeness and contiguity

– Report in depth

• Share– Import & export plans– Publish a plan


Added Features in 2010-13• Shapefile import/export• PDF “printing”• Open data – link to original data• Throttling• Data administration – add new data through

administrative web interface• Community layers – add your own community,

publish, and check for splits• Scoreboards, contest submission workflows• Internationalization

– Localization in French, English, Spanish, Japanese

Builds on Best-of-Class Open Source Software


(Also Award Winning)


Named one of the top ten political innovations of 2011by Politico

Winner of the 2012 data innovation award, for data used for social impact, by Strata

Winner of the 2012 award for outstanding software development,by American Political Science Association

Winner of the 2013 Tides Pizzigati Prize


Platform Interface Example

Sign in – Or just View

Open Data Open Access Open SourcePrepared for 2011 CGA Conference at Harvard University 21

Choose Your Legislature

Prepared for 2011 CGA Conference at Harvard University 22

Get the Picture – Visualize Successful


Drill Down – Get The Facts


Make A Plan


Get the Details


Run The Numbers


Is it legal? How Well Are You Doing? Who’s Doing Better?


Spread the Word

Share your plans with others in the system

Publish linksHave a contest



Intervention Part 1 - Platform


Are Public Maps Different?

Our Solution:Increase Public Participation

Interest

Information Seeking

Debate & Commentary

Propose Alternatives

Consultative Government

Get the data

Evaluate maps?

Draw the Lines?

Watch theNews


How has DistrictBuilder been used?


For Transparency: Dissemination Public understanding Evaluation/comparison

For Education: Staff training Classroom teaching Student competitions

For Participation: Integrated into official decision

process Non-partisan public organizations

For Election Administration:

Internal collaboration/analysis sharing

Support for commission

Where has DistrictBuilder been used?


Used in 10 states

More than 1000 legal plans created by the public

Thousands of public participants

Millions of viewers


Intervention - Redistricting Competitions Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, New York, Virginia,

City of Philadelphia Inspire participation Transform the redistricting story

Virginia Redistricting Competition• Participants

– Eligible: Any student from Virginia College/University• Incentives

– Potential media attention– Honorarium: $200– Prizes: $500-$2000

• Criteria– Legally required redistricting criteria: equal population, contiguity, voting

rights, completeness– Good government criteria: communities of interest, county & city boundaries,

competitiveness, partisan balance– Explanatory narrative

• Timeline– Nov 2010 (recruitment) -March 2011 (awards)


Plan Evaluation Criteria


Majority-Minority Representation

Number of districts in which minority population > 50% of the district

Population Equality percentage deviation from ideal district population

County Integrity Number of times counties & independent cities are split by districts

Compactness Normalized ratio of (perimeter of district)/(area of district)^2

Partisan Balance Number of Republican leaning districts minusNumber of Democratic-leaning districts

Competitiveness Number of districts with normal Democratic vote share in [45%-55%]


Data

Domain: Virginia Redistricting Proposals- All redistricting plans submitted by members of the

public- All redistricting plans proposed by legislature- All plans proposed by redistricting commission

Exclusions:- Proposals that did not meet minimum legal criteria- Plans developed internally by legislature, but never

proposed publicly


Examples: Winning Plans


Resu

lts: V

A Co

ngre

ss


Resu

lts: V

A Se

nate


Resu

lts: V

A H

ouse


Results from Virginia

• Students can create legal districting plans. • The “best” plan, as ranked by each individual criterion,

was a student plan. • Student plans

– demonstrated a wider range of possibilities than other entities. – covered a larger set of possible tradeoffs among each criterion. – were generally better on pairs of criteria.

• Student plans were more competitive and had more partisan balance than any of the adopted plans.

Preview of Florida

• Yes, Virginia, the public can draw districts

• Revealed preferences of the legislature – stick it to the Democrats



Observations

• There is likely a tension, particularly among state legislative districts, among greater population equality, compactness, and respect for local political boundaries.

• Political reform goals may be more reliably implemented by including them explicitly in redistricting criteria, not subsuming them in other administrative criteria.

• Effective redistricting reform will include a role for the on-line public participation in line-drawing and evaluation.

Lessons for Future Engagement

• What works– Technology is an enabler … many more plans created by public than in previous decades– Engagement of good-government groups, or other advocates is also critical to public participation– Permeability of government authorities (legislature, courts) to public input needed to have significant effect

• Technology barriers– Tools for collaborative construction – Tools for web-based visualization and analytics

• Government resistance through data availability– Not providing election results merged with census geography – Redistricting authorities may purposefully restrict the scope of the information they make available.

• For example, a number of states chose to make available boundaries and information related to the approved plan only.

– Non-machine readable formats – No API or automatable way to retrieve plans/data

• Forms of government impermeability– Authorities blatantly resist public input by providing no recognized channel for it; or– Create a nominal channel, but leaving it devoid of funding or process;or– Procedurally accept input, but substantively ignore it



Future R&D


Future Research• Analyze results from other states

– over a dozen states had public processes• Randomized interventions• Evaluate effect on participants• Computer-aided automated redistricting• Characterizing plans

– semantic fingerprints for maps• General methods and tools for eliciting geospatially based

preferences and opinions– Combine: What’s your community?; What’s your opinion?; What’s

your location– Integrate: Data collection & management and distribution– Sustain: Reintegrate editing workflows into core open-source GIStools

Additional References


• Altman, Micah. "Is automation the answer: the computational complexity of automated redistricting." Rutgers Computer and Law Technology Journal 23 (1997).Altman, Micah, Karin MacDonald, and Michael McDonald. "From Crayons to Computers The Evolution of Computer Use in Redistricting." Social Science Computer Review 23.3 (2005): 334-346.

• Parker, Frank R. Black votes count: Political empowerment in Mississippi after 1965. UNC Press, 1990.

Questions?E-mail: [email protected]:informatics.mit.edu


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