District assignments are propagated up and down the geographic hierarchy. As the assignment process is in progress, districts can be frozen to prevent reassignment. Also during the assignment process, checks for contiguity and that the residence of the current legislator is within the district boundaries can be made. Once a plan is complete, reports are generated showing racial breakdowns of the districts at a selected geography level. Plan wide statistics such as population range, and measures of variance and deviation in population between districts can also be produced.
Reports comparing plan statistics summarizes the relative merits of each plan.
Maps showing the new districts in a cartographically pleasing fashion are plotted and possibly published to a web page. What to Look For A redistricting package should supply preprocessed Census data and also include a translator capable of processing new population and map data as it is revised and released by the Census Bureau. A translator that can access the compressed data directly from the CD saves time and disk space. Since many different potential plans will be generated, the package must provide menus for defining plan name, date, author, number of districts and other summary information about the plan and for saving the plans and subplans. If the system will be used by multiple personnel there may be requirements for protecting plans from modification or even from viewing by other users of the system.