How Geographic Information Systems Can Help Maximize Minority Voter Influence - Brief Article

Black Issues in Higher Education, Dec 21, 2000 by Ronald Roach

During the 1980s and early 1990s in jurisdictions across the South, Black voters successfully sued localities where voting districts were drawn to intentionally minimize the chances for electing an African American to political office. While passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act provided the legal basis by which voters could sue local governments and state legislatures for discrimination, software companies and academia gave voters a tool to design plans that could maximize minority voter influence.

By the early 1990s, community groups around the nation began getting access to geographic information systems (GIS) software to submit redistricting proposals to local governments and state legislatures. Use of such software marked a revolutionary step for citizens, especially for aggrieved Blacks who for decades lived in localities where voter districts were drawn to prevent the election of Black officials.

"First, it was a powerful (and empowering) impact that allowed the most precise drawing of lines ever including very precise racial allocations in efforts to maximize minority districts," says Dr. Alex Willingham, a professor of political science at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. "I think this is a technical innovation that we simply have to live with and it will be widely available in the 2000 round."

As the nation undergoes the process of political reapportionment next spring based upon the results of the 2000 Census, a number of political scientists, including Willingham, and other faculty members will have a significant role in bringing GIS technology to minority communities. The task is expected to mirror the work that was begun by faculty members in the early 1990s.

"In the 2001 round of apportionment, we expect to gain new participants," says Dr. Rudolph Wilson, chair of the Norfolk State University political science and economics department in Norfolk, Va.

Wilson notes that 15 historically Black colleges and universities and 15 majority White schools participated in a reapportionment assistance project that utilized GIS technology in the early 1990s. Norfolk State served as the lead institution in that initiative that was underwritten by foundation funding, according to Wilson.

In April 2001 when the Census data related to political reapportionment is released, Wilson expects that many more schools than in 1991 will have faculty members trained to assist community groups with developing redistricting plans with GIS software. Workshops are currently underway and scholars and their staffs are learning to use the latest GIS software.

Wilson says GIS use should be more common this round of reapportionment given that the software has been improved and gotten cheaper. He mentions that in recent years six HBCUs have been designated as Census information centers, a development that provides the institutions direct access to Census data;

"In the early 1990s, it was DOS-based software. All of the technology is Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows 2000 compatible. There have been tremendous advances in the software," Wilson says.

THE NEED FOR GIS

Typically, a group of minority voters in a town, city, county or state have turned to GIS technology to develop maps that would maximize the number of minority voters in a political district. Political jurisdictions range for elected office, such as school boards, city councils, county commissions, state representatives and U.S. congressional representatives.

Dr. William Boone, professor of political science at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, recalls that he testified in several court cases during the 1980s and 1990s where local voters had sued a jurisdiction over discriminatory districting plans.

"In a majority of these cases, the local Black population had never been able to elect one of their own to local office," Boone says.

Though Blacks may comprise a significant pan of a local population, the boundaries of districts could be drawn to deliberately dilute the strength of the Black vote. Localities were found to have used a variety of tactics to suppress minority voter strength, according to experts.

Wilson says greater awareness of the redistricting process by Black voters proved instrumental in the increase of Black U.S. representatives from nearly 20 in 1990 to a high of 39 during the 1990s. He says GIS technology played a role in stimulating that awareness.

"Had it not been for the technology, we cannot say that we would have been able to achieve that level of representation," Wilson says.

Wilson, however, cautions that the spread of GIS means the process by which local groups submit redistricting will become more competitive since there will be an expected increase in the number of voting plans.

Willingham says the federal courts have also gotten more restrictive with regard to the use of race for reapportionment purposes.

"[GIS] became an object of criticism as the courts shifted their attention to the use of race in redistricting, and some of the language suggests that the very use of `computers' injected an inappropriate race motive into the process," Willingham says.