Civilscope is an effort to unveil and make accessible the obscure, arcane and complex political geographies of the city. Our goal is to present these invisible boundaries in a simple and malleable way, encouraging people to reflect upon the mysterious contours of the arbitrary overlapping borders that structure and influence our civic existence. We also provide some additional information about the officials that hold power in the jurisdictions we are mapping in order to connect these areas to the people responsable for them.
Why are these shapes so strange?
Redrawing the balanced electoral districts in this example creates a guaranteed 3-to-1 advantage in representation for the blue voters. Here, 14 red voters are packed into the yellow district and the remaining 18 are cracked across the 3 blue districts.
There are two principal strategies for defining electoral districts or gerrymandering: maximizing the effective votes of supporters, and minimizing the effective votes of opponents. One form of gerrymandering, packing, is to place as many voters of one type into a single district to reduce their influence in other districts. A second form, cracking, involves spreading out voters of a particular type among many districts in order to reduce their representation by denying them a sufficiently large voting block in any particular district. The methods are typically combined, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure even greater representation for voters of another type.
The introduction of modern computers and the development of elaborate voter databases alongside special districting software has made gerrymandering a far more precise science. Using these databases, politicians can obtain detailed information about every household including political party registration, previous campaign donations, and the number of times residents voted in previous elections. Using this information alongside other predictors of voting behavior such as age, income, race, or education level, drawers of a new electoral map can predict the voting behavior of each potential district with an astonishing degree of precision, greatly increasing the efficiency of gerrymandering and reducing the chance of accidentally making a district competitive.
Map Projection
Boundary files come in a variety of different specifications and projections. We have decided to use the WGS 84 Auto standards that Google uses, which produces a standard file that can be exported to KML format for other purposes.
Our shape sources are:
- City of Chicago GIS Data
- 110th Congressional Districts Cartographic Boundary Files - U.S. Census Bureau
Other Sources
Civilscope extends the visualizations offered by the Civic Footprint and works through their open API. Their website aims to foster active citizenship by exposing how democratic institutions work, to show you "where you stand and who stands for you". Users of the website submit their address and are provided a list of legal jurisdictions they live within including precinct, police beat, ward, community area, and judicial subdistrict. A list of elected representatives is also given. We are currently linking these representatives to news headlines and other relevant information:
- Google news for headlines related to your representative
- Project VoteSmart for politician bios and voting records
- Wikipedia for community areas and neighborhood information
Contact Us
If you experience problems with the mapping of your address or with the exported KML file, please don't hesitate in notifying us.
Thank you,
Simon King,
Herbert Spencer
Interaction Designers