Thomas Hofeller

Hofeller was born April 14, 1943, in San Diego, California. He served in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War. He majored in political science at Claremont McKenna College and earned a Ph.D. in government at The Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University). == Career ==

In the early 1970s, Hofeller developed a "computerized mapping system" for the California State Assembly. Hofeller normally hid his tracks and advised his clients to do the same, warning them, "Don’t reveal more than necessary," and, "Emails are the tool of the devil." In 2017, as he was deposed under oath in a federal lawsuit challenging gerrymandered North Carolina congressional district maps, he was asked about directives Republicans had given him. "There were no instructions given to you in writing?" "There’s no paper trail against which we can evaluate your description of the instructions?" "No," he responded to both questions while denying he recalled cautioning the operatives against giving him written instructions. From January 2017 to July 2018, he was paid $422,000. == After death ==

2020 census citizenship question After his death, Hofeller's daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, made available computer hard drives that had been in her father's possession. On July 5, 2019, Judge George J. Hazel of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, which is part of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, approved the commencement of discovery into the Hofeller files. North Carolina The New Yorker was the first media outlet to obtain at least seventy thousand files and several years of emails that were saved by Hofeller. David Daley wrote that the files "...mostly pertain to Hofeller’s work in North Carolina, where he drew—and defended in court—the state’s legislative and congressional maps multiple times, after judges ruled them to be either unconstitutionally partisan or racial gerrymanders." The court cited from Hofeller's files that "metadata on maps of state legislative districts showed they were almost completely drawn months before Republican legislative leaders publicly adopted the standards for drawing them." The three-judge panel also cited his files "in concluding that he had used racial statistics to shape his maps despite public claims to the contrary." Jowei Chen, a professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, had testified in July 2019 that he had found that Hofeller had manually entered "%18_ap_blk" into nearly every draft of his mapping software when he mapped North Carolina's districts. The formula "%18_ap_blk" shows the number of African American citizens of voting age in each district. In November 2019, a court ruled that Hofeller's files were no longer considered confidential as they address political activities in other states, affecting redistricting and the national census, and could be used in other suspected cases of gerrymandering. The files covered Hofeller's work on political maps in Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, along with Nassau County in New York and Galveston and Nueces Counties in Texas. Publication Hofeller's daughter, Stephanie, several weeks after announcing her intentions on Twitter, published copies of her father's files on January 5, 2020. Encouraging others to mirror the files and to create and seed torrents as quickly as possible, Stephanie was able to keep her shared Google Drive available for just over a week before overwhelming traffic brought down the drive. Nevertheless, the plan to distribute the files was successful. == Personal life ==

Hofeller was married to Kathleen Hofeller. They had a daughter, Stephanie. Hofeller died in 2018 in his Raleigh, North Carolina home at the age of 75. ==References==