Two WM Teams Win In Redistricting Competition

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Only political experts have what it takes to take on the difficult and tedious task of redrawing political district boundaries, right?

Wrong, according to the judges of the Virginia Redistricting Contest who awarded two William and Mary teams top honors Tuesday afternoon for their redistricting efforts.

A nine-member team of William and Mary law students won first place for their Congressional district maps in the governor/commission division and second place for their state Senate maps in the competition division. An undergraduate team of five William and Mary students also entered, and won first place in the competition’s governor/commission division for their state Senate maps.

When third-year William and Mary law student Brian Cannon and his eight teammates sat down to redraw voting districts for thestatewide redistricting contest, they started with a blank map and a vision: to make districts compact while keeping people with similar interests together.

It was pretty daunting to sit down and face a blank map of Virginia when the contest started, says Cannon. “Starting was the hardest part,” he recalls. “We decided to just work in one focal area to begin with and expand from there.”

The nine-member law-school team split into smaller groups to tackle creating three different maps, one for Congressional districts, one for state Senate districts and one for House districts. The 13 college teams working on the Virginia Redistricting Competition were using new, free open-source software developed by the Public Mapping Project.

Using the redistricting software, Cannon showed WYDaily his team’s Congressional map, done by team member Nick Mueller, to help explain the reasoning behind their choices (view the teams map here and view the current district map here to compare).

The process started with the Third Congressional District, which is currently shaped like a large inkblot encompassing one part of Richmond eastward to around West Point, with a long finger jutting south through Surry and Dendron, skipping over the water to the southwest side of Yorktown and then extending through parts of Newport News, Hampton, Norfolk and Virginia Beach.

This is a messy-looking district, Cannon and his team mates believe, and the people living in Richmond don’t have the same concerns or care about all the same issues as people to the south and east, and certainly they don’t have as much in common with folks in Hampton Roads.

So, the team set Richmond into its own district, and established more contiguous, compact-looking districts around it, aiming to keep communities of interest together as much as possible while not diluting majority and minority areas (all the parameters are based on laws guiding district drawing).

They also had to keep population numbers roughly the same in each district and preserve county and city political boundaries, too, while creating their new districts.

It sounds like a lot of information to keep straight, but Cannon demonstrates that the mapping software keeps a running tally of whether new districts meet population targets and majority and minority targets, as well as offering data on compactness of a new district (the team aimed not to  dip below a 50-percent score in compactness).

The team then tackled Northern Virginia, a region of high population growth over the last decade. Currently, the area has several irregularly shaped districts. The team instead chose to slice the area into roughly concentric half-circles radiating outward from the Washington, D.C. area. The rest of the districts were easier to do after that, according to Cannon.

For the House and Senate maps (find the team’s maps in the breakout), the subgroups took a similar approach. For the House map, for example, the team focused on the city of Richmond again. The team used the river as a natural boundary, and they decided to keep individual suburb areas attached to the part of the city adjacent to them to keep together certain citizens and make the areas more compact and contiguous. The Richmond House Districts now look like pie slices, instead of various crooked fingers.

The Eastern Shore (and also the Northern Neck) has an economy more focused on the Chesapeake Bay, which isn’t necessarily the case in Virginia Beach, yet a large portion of these areas are joined together into one district. The team split the area to better follow groups of similar economic interest when creating the House Districts in that part of the state.

In all, Cannon estimates the law school team spent 10 to 20 hours a week working during the first three weeks of the competition, and then about 50 hours over the week of Spring Break to complete the project and the accompanying explanation of their decisions.

What was the most important thing Cannon took from his experience? “There are about a hundred better ways [to redraw districts], and we just came up with one,” he says. “It’s not impossible to do.”

When the team heard Tuesday that they’d taken home two top honors, Cannon says the team was thrilled. “It was a tough competition with lots of great maps and teams putting forth smart ideas. We're happy that our maps stacked up so well.

“Though this was a competition between schools, we can all agree that we're united when it comes to the idea that we can redistrict better than the General Assembly.”

All that’s left to do is decide how to spend the cash prize, a total of $1,750 for the two prizes.

The team hopes the General Assembly takes their maps seriously. “The question for the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate now becomes: 'Have you looked at our maps'?” Cannon says.

“If you do, we think this will show you we have a better way of doing this than letting the politicians pick their voters. The counter argument I've heard made to this is that ‘to the victors go the spoils.’ Citizens are not spoils in a political war. We deserve better.”

Undergrad government majors Alex Bramsen and Devin Braun talked with WYDaily about how their five-member team went about piecing together new Congressional, state Senate and state House districts.

Unlike their William and Mary graduate school counterparts who started with a clean slate, the undergrad team started instead with the 2001 maps as a starting point and decided to alter them.

“We haven’t studied the [redistricting] process in as much depth as other teams, and we hadn’t taken a class on it like [teams from] UVA, so we decided to take what was already there and mold it,” says Braun.

The team split up the work, with Bramsen tackling the Congressional districts, Braun and Bramsen working on the Senate maps and the rest of the team working on the House maps. He and his teammates wanted to focus on respecting county and city boundaries when shifting district lines, and they also wanted to try to get oddly shaped districts into a more compact shape.

Bramsen, who is from Arlington, said he started with the Congressional district in his hometown, District 8. “Some districts have dodgy lines,” he says. “I understand why, but it’s not the best way to draw them.”

So, Bramsen lopped off the long spur that reached from Arlington into Tysons Corner, an area he knew was not only a community different than Arlington, but also relatively far away.

Braun also knew a good deal about his hometown of Grayson County, and says one thing he wanted to do in that area was to get the entire county and the city into one district, which isn't the case currently.

Bramsen and Braun say aside from trying to follow city and county boundaries, their team also tried to keep their ‘compactness’ score at an average of 60 percent.

The project spanned about a month, and the team spent about 10 hours on each map for the first three weeks or so, Bramsen estimates. Like their grad school counterparts, they spent a lot of additional time over Spring Break working on the maps and the justification narrative.

“No one thought the [student] maps would be taken seriously,” says Braun, “really because it’s not partisan. We got more attention than we expected.”

In fact, on Tuesday when the teams met in Richmond to receive their awards they also got to meet a few state politicians who were interested in what the students had come up with. One senator who looked at their maps seemed a little miffed that they had drawn him out of his district, the young men recall.

“They were good sports, though,” says Braun with a smile.

One legislator – Del. Bob Brink from Bramsen’s hometown of Arlington – said he would champion the team’s Senate map in the House.

Braun and Bramsen say they’re excited their maps have caught Brink’s eye, and they’ll be paying close attention to the redistricting process as it unfolds.

“We’re definitely pleased about winning,” says Bramsen. “We were fairly confident we had good maps, but we were glad we were selected.” The team won $1,500, though members still haven’t decided what to do with the prize money.