Priorities

To realize the promise of democracy, EIL seeks to address the critical challenge of how to represent everyone fairly.

As voting rights continue to come under threat, attention is rising about barriers to equitable representation of political parties and race-based communities at the local, state, and federal levels. Despite hard fought battles to protect and advance voting rights in America, gerrymandering still exists to keep elected officials in power who are more beholden to their partisan politics than to the voters who reside in their districts. A variety of reforms have been attempted, with some succeeding, some failing, and others falling short of effective implementation. These include redistricting commissions, court actions, and structural changes, such as multi-member districts.

Recent years have seen a flowering of proposals to rescue and repair democracy in addition to redistricting efforts. These include ranked-choice voting, open primaries, approval voting, and Electoral College reform to name a few. However, enthusiasm for these reforms is often driven by intuition, not evidence. In the absence of a framework for putting reforms in perspective, a danger exists that even if one reform wins, committed advocacy will be wasted because the reform is ineffective or conflicts with others in play. As voting rights continue to come under threat, attention is rising about barriers to equitable representation of political parties and race-based communities at he local, state, and federal levels.

Two things are clear:

(a) democracy is in need of repair with escalated polarization and destabilization of democratic norms, and

(b) experts from multiple disciplines are motivated to build a science of data-driven advocacy in democracy reform.

A path forward is possible that will lead to fairer representation, more responsive government, and institutions suited for the 21st century. To aid in these goals, modern science, guided by ethical considerations, can help. The Electoral Innovation Lab applies data and technology to support effective democracy reform. Our objectives are to:

  • increase voter influence,

  • enhance representation, and

  • reduce partisan polarization.

EIL current priorities are in the following four areas:

  • The science of dynamical systems warns against the orientation of complex systems around a single dimension of variation. Instability is likely to result from this diminishing dimensionality. Examples of instability include the steps that lead to avalanches, heart attacks – and even the collapse of democracies. In the case of democracies, the rise of national-level polarization leaves fewer options for voters and legislators. In this way, the binary nature of national politics can lead to destabilization and endanger democracy itself.

    The concept of “low dimensionality” (Wang et al., 2021) provides a powerful framework for understanding many of the voting and electoral rules reforms proposed in recent years. This framework is attracting national coverage .

    Dysfunctions like extreme polarization, the difficulty of forming third parties, and partisan gerrymandering are all deeply connected to low political dimensionality. EIL fosters research to overcome such one-dimensionality. This research is not merely abstract; in every case, our ultimate goal is to identify and help implement practical paths to reform.

    Current approaches include the exploration of alternative voting methods, such as ranked-choice voting and Top Four primaries, which are conceptually appealing for their potential to reduce polarization and improve legislative bodies. However, even as they are implemented in real elections, it is not yet understood how to maximize their effectiveness, nor how to match the details of reform to communities.

    Another strategy is strengthening local politics through regional campaign finance reform. Examples include matching funds for in-district donations and public financing of state parties and local races. Localizing the flow of money has potential to reduce the destabilizing influence of national polarization.

  • Making government more responsive at state and local levels will help restore American politics. At its heart, redistricting efforts are a means of making government responsive and representative to voters.

    The Voting Rights Act sought to address a legacy of racial suppression of voters. As the VRA is continually weakened by federal court rulings, it is necessary to develop innovative approaches to ensure that disenfranchised communities can elect candidates of their choice. The need for representation is additionally urgent due to growth in minority communities, where a lack of remaining strong federal protections can result in decreased opportunities to influence electoral outcomes. Asian-American communities provide one such example of a growing demographic in need of representation. In the face of these changes in the voting rights landscape, finding creative ways to ensure fair representation for all is a matter of urgency.

    EIL has the ability to undertake projects that support representational equity at city, county, state, and federal levels. In addition to establishing a 50-state database for evaluating and scoring districts, we have computational tools for rigorously assessing fairness and identifying inequities of partisan and racial representation.

    In 2023 and 2024, we will identify opportunities for fair redistricting efforts at all of these levels. We will also provide data and analysis to inform litigation strategies in addition to state and federal legislative advocacy targeting redistricting efforts. There is hope for many positive outcomes.

    All this work will require investments in high-quality analytics. Examples of state-level work include redistricting lawsuits in North Carolina, Ohio, Missouri, and Texas; citizen-led redistricting reform in Arkansas, Utah, and other states; and county/city-level redistricting in dozens of jurisdictions nationwide.

    Our legal scholarship establishes rigorous quantitative standards to identify the severity of a community split as a result of partisan redistricting. We plan to apply our analytical capacity to ensure that such communities are more fairly represented wherever possible. This work will be guided by our staff training on racially polarized voting, as well as our considerable software development (gerrymander.princeton.edu, representable.org, and openprecincts.org).

    Another component of this work is the capture of image files of districts, which are made machine-readable with conversion to geospatial shapefiles. Shapefiles allow the historical analysis of inequities, and will be useful for researchers, journalists, activists, and others engaged in redistricting. We are now investigating access to archives and other state repositories of historical district maps, as well as large-scale databases of voter and citizen information. These resources serve to establish rich data capacity to drive our work.

  • As reforms succeed, a new challenge has arisen: understanding how the consequences of multiple reforms may interact with one another. Enactment of multiple reforms may lead to synergistic improvement – or produce unintended consequences.

    To exemplify the former, we can look to the layering of redistricting reform and alternative voting rules in competitive congressional districts. Redistricting reform successfully increased the number of competitive congressional districts in 2022 compared with 2012, as measured by the margin of victory in a two-party race. This is the case in jurisdictions with a conventional voting rule. But what happens when that rule is changed?

    In preliminary calculations, we find that enactment of ranked-choice voting or Top Four primary voting enhances competition even further. If even 1 in 20 voters are freed to express a complex preference that includes independents and both parties, the zone of competition widens. Enacted nationwide, competition would double, to one hundred districts (more than any point since the Second World War).

    However, reform combinations may also produce negative consequences. As such, the benefits of campaign finance reform that focuses on major parties could be rendered ineffective by alternative voting methods like ranked-choice or Top Four reforms. In future years, understanding both cumulative and counteractive potentials will enable the enlightened pursuit of reform strategies.

  • An essential component of pursuing democracy reform is understanding the timescales of reform: when to pursue reform, and in what sequence? Many structural reforms of interest to EIL will take years to become effective. This raises the question: how can those first few years be bridged, to ensure the intended benefits or implementation?

    A major component of democracy reform is building a short-term strategy. Preserving and strengthening democracy takes multiple forms: citizen ballot initiatives, secretary of state and attorney general races, judicial races, etc. It is critical to advocate for these actions in a strategic and comprehensive manner. Identifying what is possible is the science; determining how to do it is the engineering.