Thomas Hofeller was the mastermind behind REDMAP, the tool used by Republican dirty-tricksters to redraw state electoral maps after the 2010 census in order to deliver state and federal legislative seats to Republicans even when the majority of people voted Democrats.
Hofeller was a secretive sociopath and had long been estranged from his daughter, Stephanie, a self-described anarchist who only discovered her father had died in 2018 when she read the obit pages of the New York Times. When Stephanie recovered her father's possessions from his home, she came into possession of files detailing the REDMAP plans, files of the sort that he had long exhorted his co-conspirators not to create or retain.
Stephanie turned some of her father's files over to the government watchdog Common Cause for use in a lawsuit over North Carolina's redistricting; thanks to the frank admission of racially motivated voter suppression in Thomas's files, the court found that NC's redistricting was illegal.
Now, Stephanie has licensed all her father's files under an unspecified Creative Commons license and dumped them on Google Drive for anyone to use, exhorting others to "download and distribute this material, at will. It’s yours (be nice)."
Hofeller, for his part, is likely rolling over in his grave. He was secretive about his documents, and knew full well that they could undermine his work.“Emails are the tool of the devil,” one of the training slides on in the trove of files reads. “Treat every statement and document as if it was going to appear on the FRONT PAGE of your local newspaper.”
The Anarchist Daughter of the GOP's Gerrymandering Mastermind Just Dumped His Maps and Files on Google Drive [Alex Lubben/Vice]
(via /r/politics)
