Project Description

This site includes the results of several projects undertaken by Washington and Lee University Students in a new class taught by John Blackburn and Mark Rush entitled “Politics 295: Redistricting and Beyond” (http://home.wlu.edu/~rushm/295w02syl.htm) in the Winter 2002 Term. They were charged with drafting alternative districting plans for the legislature of Virginia. In some cases, the students developed plans for both the House and Senate.

To undertake this project, the students undertook extensive reading on the redistricting process, electoral systems and electoral law and were schooled in the basics of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Technology. They were charged with developing new district plans that used multimember districts instead of the traditional single member districts. To draw the plans they used ArcView and the AutoBound redistricting software.

A Note of Thanks

These projects and the class in which they were developed were made possible through the generous support of the Associated Colleges of the South/Mellon Information Technology Grant Program. We also wish to make a special note of thanks to Digital Engineering Corporation (http://www.digitalcorp.com/) whose generous donation of the AutoBound software made these projects possible. Finally, we offer warm thanks to our guest speakers whose visits demonstrated the importance of the link between the classroom and practical politics.

Background

The United States uses the single member district system of representation. This, along with the constitutional requirement that congressional and state legislative districts be redrawn after each census (in order to balance their populations) this is contentious and complicated due to the many elements of state and federal law, constitutional law, and political science research on electoral systems that are involved in the drawing of district lines.

In this exercise, we chose to use an alternative method of representation that entails the use of multimember legislative districts. Currently, Virginia requires that each district be represented by one legislator. Similarly, all members of Congress must be elected from discrete constituencies. In both cases, however, these electoral requirements are statutory and therefore are subject to change. Virginia, in fact, used multimember legislative districts as recently as the 1970’s.

We used multimember districts because we believed that they allow the legislators (or whoever is charged with drawing districts to promote the key values that inhere in the redistricting process (keeping existing political divisions intact, maintaining communities of interest, ensuring that districts are comprised of compact and contiguous territory) effectively while simultaneously adhering to the legal and political constraints (adhering to the one person one vote requirement, protecting minority voters from vote dilution) placed on the process of district line drawing.

For more information on all aspects of the redistricting process, visit the Center for Voting and Democracy (http://www.fairvote.org/)

For information regarding the redistricting process in Virginia see the special redistricting website at the Division of Legislative Services (http://dlsgis.state.va.us/)

For additional information on the Washington and Lee redistricting project see our other website (http://miley2.wlu.edu/redist/) or our video overview of the Winter '02 course (http://itl.wlu.edu/gis/redistw02/video.html).

Student Projects

The following links take you to PowerPoint presentations for each of our student’s projects. They are produced along with each student-redistricter’s voice-over commentary (make sure your sound is turned on!) concerning the strategies employed in drafting their respective district maps.

Comments and Feedback

We’d appreciate any and all feedback. Please feel free to send comments on the projects to Mark Rush or John Blackburn at Washington and Lee University.