The Census Bureau offers a growing suite of free, browser-based tools that are directly useful for local election administration and redistricting work, and most officials don’t know they exist. All five tools are free, require no account or login, and are updated regularly with the latest ACS and decennial census data.
QuickFacts: The first stop for any local official should be QuickFacts, which delivers instant demographic snapshots; population, age, race, income, housing, etc., for any county, city, or town in the country with no data expertise required.
TigerWeb: Next is TIGERweb, the Census Bureau’s interactive boundary map viewer. TIGERweb allows users to select features and view their attributes, search for features by name or geocode, and identify features by selecting them from a map, all without downloading any data or using GIS software. For redistricting work specifically, TIGERweb is the fastest way to check whether the Census Bureau’s official boundary for your jurisdiction matches your actual legal boundary, which is the first and most important step before any redistricting process begins.
Data.Census.gov: Third on the list is data.census.gov, the main Census data platform, which gives local officials access to American Community Survey tables at the county, city, census tract, and block group level- the population and demographic data that underpins virtually every redistricting decision.
OnTheMap: The fourth tool, OnTheMap, is less well known but highly practical. It shows where workers live and work at the local level, drawing on the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, and is useful for understanding commuting patterns, economic concentrations, and neighborhood composition, context that regularly comes up in community of interest arguments during redistricting.
CRE Viewer: The fifth tool is the Community Resilience Estimates (CRE) Viewer. The CRE tracks how socially vulnerable every neighborhood in the United States is to the impacts of a disaster, and was specifically designed to aid local planners, policymakers, public health officials, and disaster management professionals in planning mitigation and recovery strategies. While not a redistricting tool in the narrow sense, it is directly relevant to local officials responsible for understanding where vulnerable populations are concentrated and informs both district design and the community of interest analysis that courts and commissions increasingly scrutinize.
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