As part of a lecture series for Geography Awareness Week, Jim Thatcher, assistant professor in the School of Urban Studies of the University of Washington at Tacoma, came and educated Hofstra students about electoral districts on Wednesday, Nov. 13, specifically about the districts’ connection to geography.
The lecture, titled “Electoral Districting in More than Euclidean Spaces,” took place in Breslin Hall and focused on how mapping technologies can be used to analyze electoral districting.
Electoral districts are geographical areas represented by one or more seats in a legislative body. Voters registered in a particular district can only vote for candidates running for office in that specific district.
In the United States, every congressional district within a given state has the same number of people in it. “Districting” is the process of drawing those districts approximately every ten years after population data comes back from the U.S. Census Bureau. Politicians in each state vote on how their districts should be drawn based on the census results.
Gerrymandering is the practice of manipulating district boundaries in order to establish an advantage for a particular political party. One main point Thatcher reiterated throughout his lecture was that, whether intentional or not, all electoral districting involves gerrymandering.
“Regardless of what you call it, all districting is gerrymandering – any time you’re drawing a line on a map, especially for electoral politics, you’re deciding who is included and who is not,” Thatcher said.
Thatcher believes that politicians should try to be as fair as possible when drawing districts. He said he is hopeful that by the time the 2020 census comes to pass, partisan gerrymandering will no longer be as common of a tactic.
“I would like to think that things start getting better. There is also some amazing work being done by anti-gerrymandering groups [and] publicly-engaged scholars who are sprinkled around the country and my hope is that they will start this push in the right direction,” he said.
Thatcher also spoke about a research program he leads called Spatial Models and Electoral Districting Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). REU is an annual eight-week research program that takes place in Tacoma, Washington, and accepts 12 undergraduate students from colleges and universities across the country.
Students in the program learn how to analyze electoral districting using mathematical calculations and mapping software such as Mapper and ArcGIS. One of the accomplishments of students in the first REU program, which ran this past summer, is that they may have discovered proof that racial gerrymandering occurred the last time districts were redrawn in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“Heavily white neighborhoods were tacked onto existing majority non-white districts in order to shift the balance of electoral representation,” Thatcher said.
Thatcher said more research still needs to be done to corroborate these findings. Thatcher also said that researchers are currently analyzing other districts in Ohio to see if racial gerrymandering had taken place anywhere else in the state.
“If students are interested in this, the technologies … are within [their] reach – it’s something that they, as Hofstra students, can learn to do with the programs that we have here at the university,” said Craig Dalton, a Hofstra professor of geographic information systems (GIS) who invited Thatcher to speak.
Alena Clark, a senior anthropology and geography major, said Thatcher’s lecture inspired her to want to take more GIS classes.
Regardless of whether they enjoyed the subject matter, the actual material discussed in the lecture was too advanced for some.
“I enjoyed [the lecture] but the information was kind of complex for me, personally, to understand,” said Daena Vautor-Laplaceliere, a first-year global studies major.
“I really enjoyed looking at how he made the maps and considering how he got the data and drew … conclusions based off that data,” Clark said. “I think [that] is a really relevant skill to have and I’d love to know how to do more of it.”
