Well, I finally got all the re-districting
information together and updated the St. Paul DFL Precinct W6, P13 website I maintain, at http://saintpaulw6p13.blogspot.com/
As it turned out, nothing changed for our precinct, but it's not so easy to find out everything I needed to find out. I used the Secretary of State's website to locate the boundaries of the Congressional District we're in, along with the State Senate and State Legislative districts. Due to the 2010 Census, precinct boundaries may also have changed, and it took a trip to the Ramsey County website to dig out the information that our boundaries hadn't changed. I did find out that five precincts in the city of St. Paul, however, did have boundary changes.
Given the difficulty of determining all of this, and it may be important for some people in the state, I wish that every DFL Precinct Chair would create a simple website, like I did, to keep precinct residents informed of these things. The average voters are not likely to go digging around to find out how the redistricting affects them at the precinct level. It's not easy to find out, and for those whose precinct boundaries have changed or for whom their legislative districts have change, there may be surprises coming. Even the newspapers don't provide all the information people need on a local level.
This is all the more reason that web-savvy DUers should become active in their precinct organizations and put their names forward to be Precinct Chairs. By doing that, it becomes possible to assist your precinct neighbors with issues like these. While it might seem like few people would actually go to a precinct website, that's not the case. Since the website I created is at blogger.com, which is owned by Google, it pops up near the top of any Google search that looks for precincts in Saint Paul. Even if you don't know the Ward and Precinct, the website still is number 2 or 3 in the search. The traffic on the site is steady, and jumps near election and caucus time, so it is being seen.
