Want to gerrymander, or un-gerrymander, a voting district? Try using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Want to draw the route for a snow plow that will avoid school buses? Look to your GIS. Want to notify a neighborhood about the location of a construction site? GIS again.
John McKenzie of the GIS and data analysis company FLO Analytics described these past, present and future uses of spatial data on the Municipal Voice, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities’ co-production with WNHH F .
“GIS is the tool that will help stop gerrymandering,” McKenzie said, “It’s a powerful tool that can be used for good or evil.”
Gerrymandering, the process by which a redistricting agent can rig a district to swing one way or another politically, will become increasingly apparent as the 2020 Census data comes out. Spatial analysis of this data can help determine whether these lines are unfair.
The last two decades have seen these flourishing of uses of GIS. Traditionally, information about sewer lines and utility poles were drawn onto a physical map for officials to use in planning and zoning, engineering, or public works departments.
As computing capabilities increased, GIS technologies became more complex and ubiquitous.
McKenzie noted that even tools as common as Google Maps are built using GIS. Google Maps uses spatial analysis to tell users the best route to take.
That kind of analysis has implications in municipal life. McKenzie offered an example of snow plow routes. A GIS system can take into account factors like school bus routes and high traffic streets to find the optimal snow plow path.
Notifying areas about upcoming construction used to involve a person manually viewing a paper map, figuring out a radius and compiling parcel data. Now a computer can handle that in a fraction of the time.
The one issue is getting people to the new software, according to McKenzie.
“You might have only one or two GIS employees, and there’s only so much they can do,” he said, “The technology has evolved so quickly that keeping up with new stuff is overwhelming.”
The new GIS capabilities will lead to time savings. They just need to be adopted.
For McKenzie, the issue is towns and cities “don’t know what they don’t know.”
“How do you take the next step when [GIS employees’] time is spent working with what they got?”
Gerrymandering is not a technological issue. Its first recorded occurrence in this country was more than two centuries ago, ages before GIS. And partisans of all stripes have used GIS for years to gerrymander. My former office provides technical support for redistricting in CT. It does so on a nonpartisan basis. But the parties are perfectly capable of using GIS on their own.