The Washington State Redistricting Commission is accepting redistricting plans from the public until August 15th, 2011. The Information Page describes how to submit a plan, which boils down to downloading their spreadsheet (XLS) and filling in districts for Congress and/or Legislature.
Although the Commission provides no tool, you can use Dave's Redistricting App to build a plan and then fairly easily copy the result into the Commission's spreadsheet.
The Commission provides KML files representing the precinct shapes, which can be loaded into Google Earth for viewing. The Commission has a Excel spreadsheet with the population info, including demographic data. The basic instructions are to view the map and decide which precincts to place in which district. The spreadsheet does aggregate the population info via a pivot table, which is helpful, but that's all the assistance you get.
You can, however, use DRA, which makes it way easier. I've outlined the steps for using DRA and then getting the data into the Commission's spreadsheet here and also below the fold.
Remember you have only until August 15th!!
Here's how to use DRA and then get the result into the Commission spreadsheet:
• Build your map for Washington in DRA using 2010 Voting Districts.
◦ Make sure you've put every precinct in some district (using Tools/Find Unassigned Dists).
• Save your map as a CSV file (using File/Save VTD Data As CSV).
• Download the Redistricting Commission's XLS file and open in Excel (for me it complained that the format was corrupt but allowed me to open it anyway).
• Now open a blank spreadsheet in Excel. (This is for loading your map CSV. If you open it directly, Excel messes up the precinct identifiers by trying to interpret tham as numbers).
◦ Click Data to get to the Data Ribbon (Excel 2007 or later; earlier versions I believe call this Import Data).
◦ In the Get External Data section (left side of the ribbon) click the From Text button.
◦ Locate the CSV file you saved.
◦ Walk thru steps to load the CSV, telling Excel it's comma delimited and IMPORTANT that the Geoid2 column is Text!!! (This is because Excel tries to interpret the values as numbers and messes some of them up.)
• In your loaded spreadsheet remove all rows for Water precincts (Geoid2 value has the text "WV" in them; most, but not all, have the word "Water" in the Name). This is because the Commission's spreadsheet leaves out these precincts.
• Sort the spreadsheet by Geoid2. You'll be given a choice of how to sort the text: Select Sort numbers and numbers stored as text separately.
• Optional: View your spreadsheet and the Commission's side-by-side and verify that all of the precincts are in the same order in each. Their Precinct Code will match the last 5 or 6 characters in the Geoid2 column in your spreadsheet.
• Now copy all the values of the column "District" from your spreadsheet and paste them into the Commission spreadsheet in the column "New Congressional District" (or New Legislative District if you're building a Legislative map).
• Save the Commission spreadsheet and follow their instructions for sending it in.
That's it. It's a bit of a pain to have to remove the Water districts and load the CSV that way. The alternative is to enter district numbers for the 6811 precincts by hand.
Good luck!
[Update] There are 6 tiny precincts that couldn't get colored before Version 2.2.10 (just released). They represent a total of 14 people. In Version 2.2.10 I've handled this by attaching those 6 to adjacent precincts, so they get colored together and therefore your resulting spreadsheet will assign all of them. If you started a map before reading this, make sure to uncolor and recolor these precincts, which will color the attached tiny 6:
PAC 30-2856 (King County, City of Pacific)
SEA 43-1280 (Seattle, east side of Green Lake)
BOT 01-0262 (King County, south side of City of Bothell)
DES 30-0954 (King County, City of Des Moines, bordering City of Federal Way)
Stanwood 5 (Snohomish County, City of Stanwood)
Mountlake Terrace 8 (Snohomish County, City of Mountlake Terrace)