Project
References

Your requirements identification for the project will be largely driven by the overall goals, along with the reading of some background papers. See below for an annotated list of the reading.

    General

  1. Key terms in redistricting
  2. Partisan Gerrymandering and Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, McGhee, Volume 23, 2020, pp. 171-185.
  3. The Politics of Congressional Elections, 9th Edition, Gary C. Jacobson, Jamie L. Carson, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, December, 2015, ISBN-13: 978-1442252622.
  4. Redistricting, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting#cite_note-6
  5. You can review your map of precincts with the interactive map available at the NY Times Web site.
  6. Gerrymandering, Franklin L. Kury, Roman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 2018 - This slim book provides and excellent background to the project, and also contains a helpful table listing the redistricting requirements for each state.
  7. US Elections Project, http://www.electproject.org/home. Contains links to sources of data.

    8. Measures

  8. Beyond the Circle: Measuring District Compactness using Graph Theory, Matthew P. Dube and Jesse Tyler Clark, 2016 - the paper provides an interesting discussion of a graph theory approach to measuring compactness. This approach should be very fast and fits well with the project.
  9. Quantifying Gerrymandering in North Carolina, G. Herschlag, et al, 2018
  10. Extreme Maps, Laura Royden and Michael Li, Brennan Center for Justice, NYU School of Law, 2017, https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Extreme%20Maps%205.16_0.pdfThis paper contains an excellent summary of some of the measures of political gerrymandering. In addition, it contains numerical results of their analysis that you might find useful in the testing phase of your project.
  11. Planscore - Partisan Gerrymandering historical data - compares relative amounts of gerrymandering in states through 2016.
  12. Using Outlier Analysis to Detect Partisan Gerrymanders: A Survey of Current Approaches and Future Directions, G Ramachandran and D. Gold, Election Law Journal, Volume 17, Number 4. - Provides a reasonably current survey of approaches to the probabilistic analysis of Gerrymandering.
  13. Unintentional Gerrymandering: Political Geography and Electoral Bias in Legislatures, Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2013, 8: 239–269.
    Original paper on the probabilistic approach to measurement of Gerrymandering.
  14. Comparison of Plans for the Virginia House of Delegates, MGGG, 2019 - paper referenced by the MGGG code.
  15. Recombination: A family of Markov chains for redistricting, Daryl DeFord, Moon Duchin, and Justin Solomon, March 27, 2020.
    A more recent and more detailed paper that describes the MGGG approach to the measurement of racial bias in the analysis of district plans.
  16. Measuring Geometric Similarity Across Possible Plans for Automated Redistricting, Gilvir Gill, VIP/PoliTech Technical Report, Stony Brook University, 2021-1.
  17. Political Fatness: An Improved Measure of Compactness For Redistricting Calculations, Darren Kong, Hugo Mainguy, and Jeffrey Zhong, VIP/PoliTech Technical Report, Stony Brook University, March 29, 2021.

    18. Data Formats

  18. Shapefile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile - geospatial vector data format developed and regulated by ESRI
  19. GeoJSON - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoJSON
  20. Coordinate systems - ESRI provides information about coordinate systems typically used in GIS applications. You can search for information on specific coordinate systems in epsg.io.

    Sources of Data

  21. DATA-USA contains government data, including political data.
  22. The MIT Election Data Science Lab site attempts to aggregate data from official sites, and also reports on data anomalies. For many states, it contains precinct level election result data. Unfortunately, most data is not recent.
  23. The Harvard Election Data Archive contains geographic and election result data at the precinct level.
  24. The Public Mapping Project has many references to background material, as well as links to possible data sources.
  25. The Open Elections Project
  26. A github repository that might contain useful data
  27. PlansScore - Partisan Gerrymandering Historical Data - a comprehensive historical dataset of partisan gerrymandering. It provides a nice summary of gerrymandered plans, including excellent summaries of the results of standard measures of political bias.
  28. US Census Bureau
  29. IPUMS - A source for worldwide census data that includes US Census data.
  30. Voting Districts - US Census description of US voting districts
  31. Data.gov is a US Government resource that provides access to lots of useful data, including boundary data for Congressional districts.
  32. US Supreme Court Blog for Gill v. Witford. http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gill-v-whitford/. Contains links to many documents of interest in the project.
  33. MGGG (Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group) - Contains lots of relevant data.
  34. The National Historical GIS (NHGIS) contains summary statistics and GIS files for U.S. censuses and other nationwide surveys from 1790 through the present. It also contains state boundary data.

    35. Analysis/Libraries

  35. QGIS - Free and Open Source Geographic Information System
  36. Fiona - Python library for reading and writing geographic files.
  37. Shapely - Python library for geometric calculations
  38. GeoPandas - an open source project to make working with geospatial data in Python easier
  39. PYSAL - Python Spatial Analysis Library
  40. PROJ -  a generic coordinate transformation software that transforms geospatial coordinates from one coordinate reference system to another. The Python interface to PROJ is pyproj.
  41. JTS Topology Suite - an excellent Java library that can be used for geographic calculations and manipulations.
  42. A blog contains a good description of Python libraries that can be used in geometric preprocessing.
  43. Turf - A collection of JavaScript functions that process GeoJSON data.
  44. Leaflet mapping library
  45. You may find the 21 day free trial to ArcGIS Pro useful.
  46. Mapshaper - video describing a useful tool for correcting data in geometric files (e.g., non-adjacent boundary data).

    47. Algorithms

  47. When Boundaries Collide: Constructing a National Database of Demographic and Voting Statistics, Brian Amos, Michael McDonald, and Russell Watkins, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 81, Special Issue, 2017, pp. 385-400. The paper provides a clear description of the issues involved in mapping census data to precincts.