Before we dive into PlanScore, tell us how maps became the focus of your career.
I zeroed in on maps during my 9 years as technical director at Stamen Design. We had primarily been focused on tech and design and the team found that geospatial data, visualization and mapping was our sweet spot. For me, personally, three things became super compelling about maps:
- Showing spatial problems so people can understand them.
- A deep appreciation and value of open data being produced.
- Politics, government, and their relationship to spatial problems.
I followed these interests to all sorts of places working at their nexus, such as Code for America, Remix, and now Meta (formerly Facebook).
PlanScore is a group of legal, political-science and mapping experts working to make redistricting fair and easy to understand via a simple website. Why did you feel the need to start this organization?
Before I talk about PlanScore, let’s talk about the problem we’re solving: partisan gerrymandering. Every 10 years when the decennial U.S. Census is released, congressional district maps are redrawn by state legislators or redistricting commissions based on new population data. Gerrymandering the tactic of manipulating how these lines are drawn to create an advantage for one party or class.
PlanScore came out of a sense that gerrymandering was upending fundamental components of our democracy. The more I looked into it, the more I understood just what kind of power was in the hands of those drawing these new lines on maps. Districts intend to give everyone fair representation so that voters can influence the work of the legislature. Gerrymandering denies voters that right, impacts what issues are discussed in Congress, and changes what types of laws are enacted.
Once I understood the process being used to gerrymander, it felt kind of wild that we didn’t have better tools to expose whether a plan was fair or not, considering these same tools were being used to create the plans themselves. Justice Kagan wrote this in her 2018 Gill v. Whitford dissent:
“Technology makes today’s gerrymandering altogether different from the crude linedrawing of the past. New redistricting software enables pinpoint precision in designing districts. With such tools, mapmakers can capture every last bit of partisan advantage, while still meeting traditional districting requirements (compactness, contiguity, and the like). Gerrymanders have thus become ever more extreme and durable, insulating officeholders against all but the most titanic shifts in the political tides. The 2010 redistricting cycle produced some of the worst partisan gerrymanders on record. The technology will only get better, so the 2020 cycle will only get worse.”
That’s what made us start PlanScore. I had a deep sense that something wasn’t quite right under the hood of our congressional district maps, and that we could contribute to a solution that would yield fairer results. So I connected with public policy researchers, litigators, and academics to create a service that could transparently score district plans and fairness. The 2020 redistricting maps are being drawn and evaluated right now and this time we have the tools in place that are needed to evaluate them.
What was the most surprising thing you learned once you got under ‘the hood’?
You cannot identify gerrymandering simply by looking at lines on map, and if you focus too much on the map, you might miss it entirely. For example, a district with an odd shape might be a majority-majority district, drawn to provide Black voters with access to representation. Or in most new cases, the shape of the district could look consistent with those around it, until you can analyze how the voters projected to vote, and how these voters are packed and/or cracked to create an advantage. The feedback, to reduce the focus on the map, and to instead focus on the voters and the fairness of plan, was consistent across all the experts I spoke with.
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