Guidelines for Transparency in Local Government Legislative Redistricting

The great majority of what is written about legislative redistricting focuses on state and federal redistricting. But many cities, even some towns, have districts too, and resetting district boundaries is an important political process designed to prevent public participation and to undermine public trust.

In January, an advisory board of experts and representatives of good government groups got together to articulate principles of transparency in the redistricting process. A short document has just been published, which summarizes the principles identified during that meeting, focusing on data and software, rather than, for example, public hearings and open meetings. The summary is valuable not only for local government redistricting, but for all sorts of transparency (e.g., budgets and developments), because it takes into account the latest technology, including geographic information software and open-source software.

Providing access to information in a form accessible to open-source software is important, because whereas governments often use very expensive, sometimes tailor-made software, open-source software, such as Google Docs, is available free to the public. Data in a dead-end format is of little use.

Geographic information software can show important information about each district, or each set of boundaries, in a visual format, so that the data can be better understood, and so that district alternatives can be better compared.

Transparency according to these guidelines will allow far more public participation than has ever been possible. Who votes where should never again be decided in backrooms for the benefit of political parties or individual elected officials. Boundaries will have to be justified in the light of far more, and far more accessible and easy to understand (because visual), information.

For more on transparency in redistricting, see an essay by Bruce E. Cain and Karin Mac Donald of Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies (2006), and a Reform Institute publication from 2005 (attached; see below, especially pages 11-15).

For the ethics of local redistricting, see an earlier blog post.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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