Our Story with the Princeton Gerrymandering Project
Fighting gerrymandering is no simple task. The complexities of American redistricting require motivated and knowledgeable people to fight for fairer maps. At Representable, we owe a lot to the team of policy experts, coordinators, and statisticians at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project (PGP) who support us in our goal to create a standardized map of communities of interest.
The Princeton Gerrymandering Project began when Professor Sam Wang, of the Princeton Neuroscience Department, was analyzing the US elections in 2004. He noticed unfair district lines distortions in representation in the US House.
“A goal of PGP is to find interesting synergies between data and math and law and use those to bring about real change at the state level,” says project manager Hannah Wheelen. In recent years, the project has blossomed into a dynamic and multidisciplinary team — dedicated to making redistricting more fair.
In 2019, Professor Wang proposed Representable as a project for COS 333, a computer science class at Princeton where teams of students build an application to solve a problem in the community.
Most COS 333 projects are limited in scope to Princeton and cease development after the class. We were incredibly excited to work with Wang because we wanted to have a larger impact on communities across the United States. We knew that PGP’s mission in fixing the bugs in democracy, aligned with our desire to design technology for social good.
While it began as a course project, Representable is built to industry standards with the latest mapping software. From the beginning, the tool was designed to be easy to use and technically robust. After the course ended, we decided that our entire team is committed to keeping up our work in order to see Representable in action. This is where our relationship with PGP has truly flourished.
PGP has provided invaluable advice to guide the development of Representable. Besides providing feedback on our ideas for bringing Community of Interest mapping to more people, their team of mathematicians, lawyers, and experts in gerrymandering have introduced us to organizational partners and provided technical support. On an individual level, PGP has challenged each member of the Representable team to think deeply and come up with innovative solutions about the complexities of gerrymandering.
On Representable, the PGP team has expressed excitement in the growth of the tool. According to Wheelen, at the beginning of its development, a success for Representable would be “a tool that we might use in New Jersey.” Now, Representable is being used in 4+ states, and this number is growing, fast. This growth has allowed us to bring on new engineers and outreach coordinators, form partnerships with a growing list of state and national organizations, and develop an even closer relationship to PGP, so that we might sync our goals of transparency and fairness in redistricting.
Moving forward, Representable and PGP are always on the lookout for ways to reach a wider audience to leverage our redistricting tools. Whether it’s providing data on voting precincts, providing state-by-state information on redistricting reforms, or creating the first ever standardized map of Communities of Interest across the country, these two teams are putting in the work to fight gerrymandering in its many forms.
Any improvement to redistricting in 2021/22 is seen as a win, for both Representable and for PGP. And we’re beyond excited to make those improvements a reality.
