MapLab: Citizen Mappers Fight for Fair Districts

With the Aug. 12 release of critical demographic data from the 2020 U.S. Census, America’s decennial redistricting is about to enter high gear. States will begin redrawing congressional and legislative district lines based on new population counts, with many locations considered high risk for partisan gerrymandering.

This year’s process is expected to be particularly fraught after a 2019 decision from the Supreme Court not to get involved with related legal battles. For weeks, voting rights organizations and some state commissions have been working to get communities involved. Some people are submitting their own maps of how they’d like to see district lines drawn.

Fair Count, a voting rights group in Georgia, has been holding “Mapping Mondays,” where residents can dial in and learn how to use Representable, an open-source platform for drawing communities of interest, a term for groups of people with related policy concerns and who would benefit from being kept together in one district. Below is one such map drawn by a resident in Henry County, Georgia, who writes that she wants to see her subdivision drawn into McDonough city limits.