By John Mercurio Erase your outdated images of Congressional redistricting - visions of a few state legislators, pencil and paper in hand, poring over census figures as they crunch numbers and draw new boundary lines.
Individual legislators can also devise plans.
That's probably the most startling development in redistricting since 1990. Contributing to this scenario is the breakneck speed with which computers developed in the 1990s. The fastest computers used for redistricting 10 years ago offered a processing speed of no more than 25 megahertz. This month, Dell Computers announced it will release a computer later this year with 800 megahertz. But other insiders said predictions of armchair remappers fail to consider how much more complex the Census Bureau's findings will be in 2000.