Maptitude for Redistricting Newsletter Fall 2020

Fall 2020 Newsletter


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A Warm Welcome to Our New Users

During the 2000 and 2010 rounds of redistricting most of the state legislatures used Maptitude for Redistricting. For the current round, we are pleased to welcome five additional state legislatures to the Maptitude community:

Alabama State Senate
Massachusetts State Senate
Missouri Legislature
Oklahoma Legislature
Vermont Legislative Council

We will report on additional new clients in future newsletters. For a more complete list of our users, visit our website. If your organization is not currently using Maptitude for Redistricting, we encourage you to talk with your colleagues at any of our client organizations and find out what they have to say about us.

“I use Maptitude for Redistricting extensively in my small law practice. Its tools help me to analyze potential voting-rights cases and to prepare professional-quality maps for use in litigation. I find that having the software in house is much more effective than contracting out for similar services. The training and support is great, and you don't have to be a GIS expert to get a lot out of it.”

Bryan L. Sells
The Law Office of Bryan L. Sells LLC

New Release: Maptitude for Redistricting 2020

The new releases of Maptitude for Redistricting 2020 and Maptitude for Online Redistricting 2020 feature numerous user interface improvements and a significant expansion in the methods and metrics provided for evaluating plans based on the latest court cases and academic research. There are also significant performance improvements.

New Methods and Metrics
As most everyone knows, there is no one single ideal metric for judging the compactness or contiguity of a redistricting plan. Consequently, multiple measures are necessary and will be insightful. The new measures include cut edges and fracking. One of the new specialized tools that enable users to evaluate plan integrity is contiguity, which is "usually measured by whether it is possible to travel to all parts of a district without ever leaving it." ("Chapter 4, Redistricting Principles and Criteria." Redistricting Law 2020, National Conference of State Legislatures, 2019, p. 77). The Travel Contiguity tool provides information on the percentage of intersections that can be reached by walking, driving, or a combination of modes, without leaving the district.

There has also been evolution in judging the partisan bias of a redistricting plan. To support such inquiries, Efficiency Gap and Partisan Asymmetry (Declination and Mean Median) are now included in Maptitude for Redistricting.

Introduced by academic mathematicians, statistical ensembles of plausible redistricting plans were pivotal in court decisions in North Carolina. Maptitude for Redistricting 2020 supports this approach and can generate vast samples of possible plans at the touch of a button.

Automated, Optimal, Non-partisan Redistricting
After a protracted research and development effort, Caliper is pleased to announce that we have developed a practical and efficient tool for automated, optimal, non-partisan redistricting. This method can be applied at various levels of geography and has been shown in our testing to be highly effective in statewide legislative redistricting. It can also be customized to address specific issues that arise in local and statewide contexts.

Automated generation of redistricting plans can serve as a point of departure for making further refinements and can demonstrate what is possible to achieve with a partisan-neutral approach. It can also greatly reduce the time and effort required to accomplish redistricting tasks.

Maptitude for Redistricting Autodistrict

Other Redistricting Services and Products from Caliper

• Training – Caliper offers Maptitude for Redistricting training virtually via screen-share. A three-day classroom course is available for a fixed, per-person cost. There is also an option for a training session customized to your group (up to 20) at a fixed daily rate.

• Software Customization – Caliper can customize Maptitude for Redistricting to meet your specific needs. Examples include custom reports, unique analytical capabilities, and the automation of report generation and map creation for completed plans.

• Data Preparation – We offer data processing services. Some examples are incorporating political data, adjusting Census data for prison, military, or student populations, disaggregating data to the block level, and aggregating data to new updated geographic layers (e.g., from old precinct boundaries to current precincts).

• Customized Reports – We offer report customization services that incorporate specific requirements for bill language, presentation and specialized data summarization.

• On-site and telephone support

• Maptitude Online Redistricting – Maptitude Online Redistricting is web-based redistricting software designed for governments or organizations that want to provide their members or the general public with a means to draw and report redistricting plans. Because the PC and online versions share common file formats, plans developed online can be electronically submitted to the central redistricting office, opened in the PC-based software, and analyzed to the full extent as if they had been created using the PC-based software.
Maptitude Online Redistricting

• Custom Plan Viewer – The Maptitude Online Plan Viewer lets you publish live maps on the Web. Caliper can create a Web application customized to your exact requirements. Under a typical scenario, the user enters an address to zoom the map and display information about the current Congressional and state legislative districts at this location, elected officials, proposed redistricting plans, demographics, and any other information you choose to include.
Maptitude Online Redistricting