As the push for more transparency and less partisanship in redistricting intensifies, PlanScore aims to be “a trusted, non-partisan resource for the redistricting efforts to come in the 2020 cycle.” The nonprofit organization formed by top legal, academic, and technical experts in the field, will do this by offering an online diagnostic tool for redistricting maps.
The Online App
The online service will assist legislative staff and the general public by allowing any geographic file uploaded by site visitors to be checked for its partisan, demographic, racial, and geometric features.
The analysis gives plan-wide scores for several statistical measures that have been used in major redistricting litigation like the efficiency gap, partisan bias, and the mean-median difference. According to Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law professor and member of the project, analyses are based on a “model incorporating election results for all congressional delegations and state legislatures from 2012 to 2018”.
The graphic below is an example of Planscore’s analysis of Wisconsin’s current state house map. For more info, read Stephanopoulos’s article on the Election Law Blog and visit the PlanScore site.
States currently supported are California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
