States of Disarray: Cleaning Data for Gerrymandering Analysis

The mathematics of redistricting is an area of study that has exploded in recent years. In particular, many different research groups and expert witnesses in court cases have used outlier analysis to argue that a proposed map is a gerrymander. This outlier analysis relies on having an ensemble of potential redistricting maps against which the proposed map is compared. Arguably the most widely-accepted method of creating such an ensemble is to use a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) process. This process requires that various pieces of data be gathered, cleaned, and coalesced into a single file that can be used as the seed of the MCMC process. In this article, we describe how we have begun this cleaning process for each state, and made the resulting data available for the public at https://github.com/eveomett-states . At the time of submission, we have data for 22 states available for researchers, students, and the general public to easily access and analyze. We will continue the data cleaning process for each state, and we hope that the availability of these datasets will both further research in this area, and increase the public's interest in and understanding of modern techniques to detect gerrymandering.