Dave's Redistricting
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Dave's Redistricting App (DRA) is an online web app originally created by Dave Bradlee that allows anyone to simulate
redistricting Redistricting in the United States is the process of drawing electoral district boundaries. For the United States House of Representatives, and state legislatures, redistricting occurs after each ten-year census. The U.S. Constitution in Art ...
a U.S. state's congressional and legislative districts.


Purpose

According to Bradlee, the software was designed to "put power in people's hands," and so that they "can see how the process works, so it's a little less mysterious than it was 10 years ago." Bradlee has noticed that many citizens are taking this process seriously and using his app to create legitimate redistricting maps that could be put in place. Some websites have called Bradlee the pioneer and cause of the rise of do-it-yourself redistricting. States such as
Montana Montana ( ) is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota to the east, South Dakota to the southeast, Wyoming to the south, an ...
in 2021 allowed the general population to use it to submit redistricting proposals following the 2020 United States Census. Dave's Redistricting has frequently been mentioned as a resource that can be used to combat
gerrymandering Gerrymandering, ( , originally ) defined in the contexts of Representative democracy, representative electoral systems, is the political manipulation of Boundary delimitation, electoral district boundaries to advantage a Political party, pa ...
, given that the public has free access to it. Political science firms such as
FiveThirtyEight ''FiveThirtyEight'', also rendered as ''538'', was an American website that focused on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States. The website, which took its name from the number of electors in the U ...
have used the website to draw examples of gerrymandered districts, including on their famous Atlas of Redistricting. Dave Bradlee built the first generation of DRA. DRA 2020 is built by a small team of volunteers — Dave Bradlee, Terry Crowley, Alec Ramsay, and David Rinn — all with a shared passion for technology & democracy and all
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
veterans. Their mission is to empower civic organizations and citizen activists to advocate for fair congressional and legislative districts and increased transparency in the redistricting process.


Functions

Users can redraw the congressional & state legislative districts for all 50 states and the District of Columbia using a variety of census & election datasets including
Cook PVI The Cook Partisan Voting Index, abbreviated PVI or CPVI, is a measurement of how partisan a U.S. congressional district or U.S. state is. This partisanship is indicated as lean towards either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, comp ...
. Maps can be optimized for different criteria. DRA 2020 added several major features to the first generation app: * Sharing & collaborative editing of maps, like Google Docs * Multiple statewide elections for all 50 states including the ability to import your own data * Comprehensive analytics for evaluating & comparing maps * Custom overlays, and * Block-level editing DRA remains free to use.


Versions

*2.2: This uses
Bing Maps Bing Maps (previously Live Search Maps, Windows Live Maps, Windows Live Local, and MSN Virtual Earth) is a web mapping service provided as a part of Microsoft's Bing suite of search engines and powered by the Bing Maps Platform framework which al ...
, an outdated software that projects the districts of a single state onto a map of the United States. *2.5: After Bing Maps announced that it would no longer be updating for the foreseen future, the U.S. Map feature was removed. * DRA 2020: At the end of 2018, a beta version of 2020 was released. This version that did not require
Microsoft Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich internet applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. While early versions of Silverlight focused on ...
and could be used in any web browser. DRA 2020 has been under continuous development since and is built using
React (JavaScript library) React (also known as React.js or ReactJS) is a free and open-source front-end JavaScript library that aims to make building user interfaces based on components more "seamless". It is maintained by Meta (formerly Facebook) and a community of ...
,
Mapbox Mapbox is an American provider of custom online maps for websites and applications such as Foursquare, Lonely Planet, the ''Financial Times'', The Weather Channel, Instacart, and Strava. Since 2010, it has rapidly expanded the niche of custom ...
,
OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (abbreviated OSM) is a free, Open Database License, open geographic database, map database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveying, surveys, trace from Ae ...
,
TypeScript TypeScript (abbreviated as TS) is a high-level programming language that adds static typing with optional type annotations to JavaScript. It is designed for developing large applications and transpiles to JavaScript. It is developed by Micr ...
, Node.js,
Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...
, as well as many open source components, tools, and icons.


References


External links

* {{official website, https://davesredistricting.org/ *https://github.com/dra2020 Redistricting in the United States Web applications Free web software