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Month: January 2020 (Page 1 of 2)

Candidate climate change wish list

January 31, 2020 /

Some things I would love to hear from political candidates in Kansas about climate.

Climate change is a present crisis.

We need to act like it. That’s difficult to do because it’s a slow-motion, planet-scale crisis, and we can only really see it when we imagine it together, collectively. We start by naming it and talking about it and our fear about it.

We can’t fix this at a micro, personal, individual level.

Better light bulbs and electric cars and recycling will not fix it. We need macro level policy and infrastructure investment. We need to join with our neighbors (e.g. re-join the Paris agreement) .

Science is real.

We need to fund and listen to our scientists. That includes:

We need to reduce the amount of carbon in the air.

That means eliminating our reliance on fossil fuels through a carbon tax and investment in alternative fuels, and changing our approach to land use (reforestation, soil improvement, what and how we farm and eat). That makes climate change an economic issue.

Kansas is getting hotter and wetter.

Climate change adaptation is already happening. We need public policy to reflect our need to adapt. We need the state and federal governments to invest in urban, agricultural and ecological planning to reflect that fact. That makes climate change a public health and safety issue.

Housing is always cheapest in the flood plain.

Climate change disproportionately affects low-income and historically disadvantaged communities.  That makes climate change a civil rights issue.

No one expects you, as a candidate, to fix the problem.

That’s not what we’re asking of you. What we’re asking is that you talk about the problem, and that the story you tell about it reflects the anxiety and urgency that we feel about it. It helps to have you reflect that back to us, and that you are not afraid to go up to Topeka or Washington and stand up and say we need to do some big, bold and imaginative things to address it. Not one thing, but many things: it’s about both reducing CO2, and making the kind of structural, policy investments that will help our cities and towns and farms adapt.

Electoral Maps

January 20, 2020 /

Early on in 2017 I had two conversations that set me on the path of learning about maps. One was with Mike Gaughan, who suggested that it might be possible to identify neighborhoods in Kansas with larger-than-normal numbers of unregistered voters. The other was with Paul Davis, who suggested that it might be possible to identify Kansas state legislature districts that could be flipped with targeted outreach to just a few neighborhoods.

I knew that one of the big issues affecting election outcomes was how the maps get drawn for political districts: state legislative districts, congressional districts, etc. But how did those political district boundaries correspond to the votes that are cast? No one seemed to have a map that could show me, for any given district, how the votes in that district for a given election correspond to streets and addresses. Or how did a particular neighborhood vote from one election to the next. State elections can often be decided by dozens of votes, so knowing how a particular neighborhood votes (or fails to vote), from year to year, could be a significant datum to understand.

I realized that it was hard to take a research and data-driven approach to a geographic problem without good geographic data. And none of the Democrats I spoke with seemed to have that data. So I decided I was going to create a map-oriented research tool for elections over time.

The Map Is Not The Territory

One fact in particular made the map data hard to acquire and use. Election results are reported to the Kansas Secretary of State at the county level. Each county clerk tallies up the votes (a process called certifying an election) and sends those numbers to the SoS office. Kansas has 105 counties. If you look at a map of Kansas counties, one thing you will quickly realize is that they are all mostly the same size and shape. That’s because the county boundaries were drawn very early in the state’s history without regard to where people lived and without knowing where they would settle a century later. County boundaries ignore population and they do not change over time.

Political district boundaries, however, are entirely about population and they change over time based on relative movements in the population. The idea around equal representation is that each district has roughly the same number of people, not the same number of acres. This is what gives political map drawing its power, because the political district boundaries could be drawn in carefully constructed ways to maximize a particular kind of voter in a given district.

So elections are reported by counties. Counties are about land size and don’t change. Districts are about population and change frequently. To borrow a math metaphor, what is the least common denominator?

The Precinct

The precinct is a geographic boundary that aligns with a political boundary. Every county is made up of one (often dozens) or more precincts. Every ten years the county clerk’s office divides the county into territorial entities in order for the federal government to count all the people in the census. Those territorial entities are called census tracts. Everyone gets counted in exactly one (we hope). Each census tract is also a voting district, or precinct. (It gets more complicated in the ten years between census takings. Read on for more.)

Most significantly, political district boundaries align with precinct boundaries. In your precinct, you belong in exactly one state house district, one state senate district, one congressional district. A political district is, in other words, the sum of its precincts. (Precincts are also vital to how political parties work, which will be the subject of another post.)

So if I wanted a map that would show, over time, how Kansans in specific neighborhoods vote, or if there were neighborhoods with a predictably low voter registration or turnout record, I would need reliable precinct-level election data, voter registration data, and I would need precinct-level map coordinates in the form of shapefiles.

Seemed straightforward enough at the time, I thought. I just need to look around on the internet and between the SoS website and the census.gov website, I’m sure I’ll find everything I need.

Oh foolish, silly, naive man. I look back on you now and chuckle at your enthusiasm. Of course, if I had known how hard it was to acquire those data and make sense of them over time, I might not have started in the first place. Deceptively simple problems get a lot of yaks shaved.

Fortunately, I quickly stumbled upon other people who were thinking the same things about maps and precincts, and other people who had been working hard at the precinct election data problem for a long time. I was able to follow in their footsteps.

In my next post I’ll dive into the nitty gritty of the challenges I encountered building the map.

Talking to Democrats

January 18, 2020 /

I am not particularly attached to the Democratic Party. Until 2017 I wasn’t registered as a Democrat. (And I only registered as one because the KDP, reasonably, wouldn’t let me help with their data otherwise.) My personal politics are more green/socialist. I just saw the Democratic party as the group best positioned to swing state races in 2018 and defeat 45 in 2020.

So in 2017 I reached out to my state and county parties and started cold-calling people. Would they meet me for coffee and talk about politics and technology? Yes they would!

I asked everyone three questions:

  • could technology have changed the outcome of the 2016 election?
  • if yes, what could someone like me do to help for 2018 and 2020?
  • who else should I talk to?

I’m very grateful for everyone who explained how precincts work, how county and state parties work, how the voter file works, how campaigns work, how campaign technology works (and doesn’t work). I spent several months meeting all sorts of Democrats, in Kansas and elsewhere (thanks to the wonders of the internet) and listening to their answers to my three questions. It turns out I knew very little about how elections work. Everything else I have been doing since then stems from something I discovered while talking to the Democrats that year who were so generous with their time and knowledge.

Follow a Bill

January 18, 2020 /

After the election, reading was how I spent my free time in November and December of 2016. That, and talking to my brilliant partner about all I was learning about political machinery. As it happens, she is a professor who teaches social policy and takes her students on field trips to the state capital in Topeka. She suggested that if the state legislature was so important, I should learn how it actually works: find a bill and follow it through the legislative process.

So I went to the Kansas legislature website and tried to figure out how to follow a bill. I found I could search bill text and find bills if I knew their number, but I could not find a feature that would send me email whenever the status of the bill changed: when it was going to be discussed in committee, or voted on, etc. I knew from using the federal congress.gov site that it was possible to get alerts on federal legislation emailed to me if I created an account. The same kind of follow-the-bill alerts feature did not seem to exist for the Kansas legislature.

I figured that someone must have solved this problem already. The closest I found was openstates.org which did not have the alerts feature but did have an API that I could use. After touching base with the OpenStates developers to see if the alerts feature was planned (it was but without a timeline), I decided to see how quickly I could prototype the legislative alerts feature myself. A classic yak shaving exercise. I had three design goals:

  • The minimally viable product should take no more than a single weekend;
  • Send alert emails for a single bill or a saved search (like a Google alert);
  • Store the minimum amount of user account information possible.

Since I had been doing a lot of Ruby on Rails development for my day job, I decided to use that tool to meet goal number one. Goal number three was made possible thanks to the wonders of OAuth: I could let users log in using an existing account (Google, Twitter, GitHub, but not Facebook since I did not (yet) have a Facebook account). Goal number two proved to be the trickiest but that was where all the fun was. I found an existing Ruby client for the OpenStates API and after some experimentation, hit on a data model that did most of what I wanted. The end result seemed good enough to me that I decided to go ahead and register a domain name and set up a GitHub organization and a Twitter account. I figured I would use it, at least, and since it could search all US states, maybe others would find it useful.

What I did not know yet was what bill I should follow. This is what yak shaving can lead to: lots of energy spent working on the thing you think you need in order to do the thing you want to do, and then sort of forgetting about the thing that got you shaving that yak to begin with. (I did eventually find a bill to follow: my own.)

Each year since then I have updated the site to reflect changes to the OpenStates API and to make small improvements. But basically the site is as it was three years ago. It does one thing and it tries to do it well. I’m told that the OpenStates.org site itself will soon offer the same kind of functionality. When it does I’ll be glad to shut down legalerts.us and treat it as a learning exercise that helped me experience how a bill becomes a law.

How I Spent My Fall Vacation

January 17, 2020 /

In 2016 I could not have imagined I would come to know my way around the Kansas Statehouse, and yet two years later I was the one guiding my fellow members of the new governor’s transition team through the entry with the metal detectors and into the limestone catacombs. It’s funny how you find yourself places.

I am starting an accounting of what I was up to between Election Day 2016 and Inauguration Day 2019, and what I have learned the last few years as an accidental activist, things that went well and things that did not. A retrospective of one.

Election Day 2016

It would be too simple to say that the results of the 2016 American presidential election pushed me into politics. There were really a lot of factors that got me off the couch. But certainly I was angry and unmoored on Wednesday, November 9. Not because my candidate lost. My candidate wasn’t on the ballot. I gritted my teeth and voted Democratic on Tuesday, like a lot of people. I felt a lot like I did after the 2004 election. I was not enthusiastic about the Democratic candidate, but the Republican candidate was so obviously a poor choice that I just could not understand why so many of my fellow Americans voted for them. In this case, my primary fear was about the critical issue of the climate. We only get one planet, and science shows that the human species is pretty well screwing it up for ourselves and all the other species. The GOP candidate was going to ignore and belittle the science at a critical moment in history when decisive political action is needed by the world’s biggest economy and carbon producer. That was just unconscionable and unacceptable to me.

The Morning After

The first thing I did after Election Day was read a lot of the morning-after analysis and second-guessing. As an engineer, I was most interested in understanding the tactical and logistical reasons the election had ended the way it had, and what could be done to change the outcome next time. Setting aside the whole mess of presidential candidate narratives, and what campaigns and foreign governments did or failed to do, I took away a few things.

  • The maps are skewed. Republicans had systematically targeted state legislatures around the country, won control of many of them, and used the power of district boundary drawing after the 2010 census to gerrymander their way to control of the US House. It was really ingenious. Hats off to them for the strategy and the execution.
  • The state legislature is where the action is. Having wrestled away power at the state level, the Republican party was able to set the policy agenda and define the terms of political debate. Taxes, schools, roads, budgets, redistricting. This was very evident in Kansas where I live. Since the moment we moved here in 2013, my daily newspaper was filled with budget crises, Supreme Court suits over school funding, concealed carry gun rights expansion. All because the legislature and the governor’s office were controlled by conservative Republicans determined to starve the state government till it was small enough to drown in the bathtub.
  • The Democratic party, during the glamour years of the Obama administration, failed to invest in state and local parties, in campaign infrastructure, and in building a bench of local elected officials who could compete in federal races. School boards, county commissions, water boards, city councils: these local elected offices are where people learn the mechanics of campaigning and governing. Any professional sports fan knows most players don’t jump from high school to the pros. The senior teams develop and groom a pipeline of qualified players who can compete, and the best get promoted. The Democratic party had failed to do that.

I learned all that by reading: the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the great raft of internet pundits, my local public library. We had recently acquired a new chair at my house, and I settled into what became known as my “nest” by our unlit fireplace, books and magazines stacked on the brick hearth.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time on Twitter. I created my first Facebook account so I could start to understand how people could be so affected by that product. I joined every email list for every nascent group committed to resisting the new administration. (I have since unsubscribed from nearly all of them.) And I got ready to get to work.

This is the first in a series of posts. The title of this one comes from one of my favorite songs. I didn’t want to be “just sitting at home, growing tenser with the times.”

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