Steven Wu at Lawmeme has been at a convention on the constitution and thinking of the use of software for gerrymandering, discussed by one panel.

"Almost every panelist at one point mentioned a piece of software that has become popular in state legislatures: Caliper's Maptitude for Redistricting, which the website advertises as:

'a special edition of Caliper Corporation's Maptitude GIS for Windows that includes everything you need to build and analyze redistricting plans. As you assign area features to a district, the district boundaries are redrawn and selected attributes are automatically summarized to reflect the district's characteristics.'

Basically, as one of the panelists put it today, Maptitude allows you to do just about anything you want with a redistricting plan, once you plug in the demographic data. You want districts that are as evenly balanced politically/racially/genderly as possible? How about a lot of majority-minority districts? How about districts that will protect incumbents, by filling them with people of the incumbents' political party? Whatever your preferences, Maptitude can generate the appropriate redistricting lines in half an hour or less."

...An unseen part of the evoting story that not too many people have been registering.