The debate over how you draw lines can feel a little theoretical – the usual cable-news partisan food fight – until you see exactly how it is done these days. The days of mapmakers with fancy pencils and parchment sheets and desks covered with papers have given way over the last two redistricting cycles to very powerful computer programs.As the technology has grown more sophisticated, so too has the king of demographic and personal information that we leave simply by traveling across the Internet on any given day. Mapmakers have access not only to the massive amount of demographic data collected by the U.S. Census, but they can also purchase any number of other databases or public records. Anything you like on social media, anything you purchase online, any license or registration or magazine subscription: in the same eerie way that you are tracked across the Web by an ad, you are likely landing in some direct marketer’s database as well.

All the statistical data might have been too much information before computers became so fast, but the tools available to the mapmaker in 2010 have improved so rapidly since 2000 it’s as if they had been using those old America Online discs included with the Sunday newspaper. The mapmaker has become all-knowing.

William Desmond greets me at his Scottsdale, Arizona, home looking more pumpkin-cheeked than omnipotent. Desmond’s living room is filled with vinyl records, lots of indie rock and alt-country. Jason Isbell’s Something More Than Free sits atop the stereo system. The technology is more state-of-the-art in his office, where he’s agreed to show me how easy and powerful the Maptitude program is while the perfect desert sunset unfurls through the window over McDowell Mountain. Desmond works as a senior microtargeting analyst for a company called Strategic Telemetry, and served as the lead map-drawing consultant to the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission on their legislative and congressional districts.

He joined the firm after being one of the young stats wunderkinds who helped elect Barack Obama, as the project manager for modeling on the 2008 Obama for America campaign.