ACLU Analytics in 2021: An Update (Part 1)
Two years ago, we launched this blog to introduce our team to the world. Despite (or perhaps, because of) all that’s happened in between — from a global pandemic to numerous attacks on our civil rights and civil liberties — we’ve continued the fight, alongside the ACLU’s litigators and advocates. What have we been up to? Read on to find out…
Deepening our expertise to protect voting rights
When we checked in last, the ACLU had just won the Supreme Court case over whether the Trump administration could add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The decision was a critical step to ensure that people of all backgrounds would be counted accurately in the Census, and thus, that their voices would be heard in our political system. This year, we are going one step further by launching a multi-state program to ensure that fair maps are drawn in the once-in-a-decade redistricting process.
Every ten years, states redraw their district maps (at the congressional, state, and local levels) to reflect population changes in the Census. In the past ten years, the U.S. population has changed substantially, with people of colour now comprising 42.2% of the nationwide population, up from 36.2% ten years ago. Key metropolitan areas, such as Atlanta, GA and Charleston, SC, have swelled. This all adds up to one thing — our political maps will need to change. In many states, partisan actors will take this opportunity to create gerrymandered (or maintain already-gerrymandered) districts to lock-in partisan advantages, and rob already underrepresented voters of colour of fair representation. We are ready to fight these bad maps through our state affiliates’ advocacy and in the courts.
To prepare for this fight, Team Analytics has built and trained a team of experts over the past year — from GIS analysts who can draw district maps rapidly, to political scientists who specialize in the computational methods used to evaluate maps. We’ve also invested in the data pipelines needed to clean and combine rich electoral and demographic data with geographic overlays. Once the new Census redistricting data dropped in August, our scaled-up team was ready to produce maps and analyses at a record pace! We’ve already filed lawsuits in Ohio and South Carolina, and have been advocating for fair maps and a transparent process in states like Georgia and Alabama. And there’s much more to come.
Redistricting isn’t the only place where voting rights are at stake. In last November’s historic election, we played an active role in making sure every vote counted — by tracking vote-by-mail ballots and making sure ballot rejection rates weren’t too high, and by making sure every mail ballot was properly counted. Unfortunately, as a result of Trump’s campaign of misinformation after the 2020 election, we are now facing an onslaught of bills attempting to suppress the vote. You’d better believe we’ll be in that fight too.
Sounding the alarm on the spread of COVID in jails and prisons
COVID has changed all of our lives, but we know where it has often hit the hardest — in our nation’s jails and prisons. As the ACLU shifted into remote work in March of 2020, our advocates and litigators immediately feared for the massive population our country traps in its jails and prisons — places where there is no possibility of social distancing and poor health and sanitation standards. The team also suspected jails would be major contributors to community spread. To evaluate the impact and create much needed evidence of this concern, our team partnered with a team of academics to build an epidemiological model that showed the world just how bad things could get in jails, and the likely impact on surrounding communities. Sadly, what seemed to everyone like an aggressive overestimate at the time (in April 2020) turned out to be fairly accurate. We are proud that our work supported advocates and litigators to save lives through their work, though we wish more judges and policy makers heeded the evidence that continued to mount in favour of decarceration to avoid jail and community deaths.
Beyond digging into voting rights and issues related to the spread of COVID-19, our team has also supported cases on issues ranging from immigrants’ rights to reproductive freedom. And we haven’t only been busy in our legal and advocacy work; read on to Part 2 of this update to see what our “Engagement Analytics” team is up to, and what’s next for our team.
For those who want to join in the fight, we are hiring! And to our community of ACLU supporters, thank you for your continued support.
