They say that a fish rots from the head and that results that people get from using a system are shaped by what went into designing the system. This came home to me last night as I watched the new documentary film, Gerrymandering at a gathering sponsored by Common Cause CT, the American Constitution Society, and the Yale Law School Democrats. The film highlighted various problems with redistricting and touched on possible ways of improving the process.

One popular idea is to take redistricting out of the hands of legislators and set up independent commissions. The film documented the efforts to get that done in California. Yet some questioned whether an independent commission would be that much better. Whatever ideas come forward, perhaps the best involve making the process more transparent.

This reflected some of what I was hearing at the National Conference of State Legislature's (NCSL) National Redistricting Seminar I attended in Rhode Island in September.

The major redistricting software vendors were there and they all talked about ways of making redistricting more open to the public. Staffers for the Florida State Senate and the Florida House of Representatives were both there demonstrating early versions of their redistricting tools.

A good place to start with the Florida redistricting effort is at www.floridaredistricting.org. For those interested in digging deeper into the Florida House of Representatives toolkit, take a look at floridaredistricting.cloudapp.net. While it is great to see a movement towards a more open redistricting process, this application is based on Microsoft’s Silverlight and won’t run on my computer, so I can’t provide further details.

Going much more open source is the Public Mapping Project. This will allow any group with sufficiently technical people to set up their own public mapping server. Various advocacy groups are looking at this as a tool facilitate public involvement in the redistricting process.

Competition to make public mapping systems where the public can compete to create better districts may be an important step these districts being more competitive.

Another aspect of this is transparency about what the goals are in redistricting. The Voting Rights Act makes places an emphasis on creating districts that do not discriminate against minorities. Other goals may include recognizing geographic boundaries or existing political boundaries. In Connecticut, for example, county boundaries are not as important as they are in other states. Some states have a bigger emphasis on nesting districts within districts. For example, having a State Senate district that crosses Congressional district lines would be considered a very bad thing in some states. Whatever the goals, they should also be made public and widely discussed ahead of redistricting.

The tools are being built for more competitive redistricting. Will people start using the tools and demand better districts this time around? We can only hope.