OpenPrecincts: A Collaborative Resource for Redistricting Reform

In 2021, state legislative and congressional districts will be redrawn. In most states, elected officials will draw new boundaries and implement them before the public has a chance to understand the maps. Precinct-level geographic election data is a critical tool for determining whether a map is fair or is a partisan gerrymander. Unfortunately, however, there is no consistent format and no central repository for this data.

At the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, we are building OpenPrecincts, an open-source collaborative effort to make this data available to the public. This platform will empower a network of volunteers with a wide variety of technical backgrounds to collect precinct geographies from states and counties, develop software that cleans the data and matches it to election results, and integrate the data with software for analyzing or drawing district maps. We hope that this project will enable the upcoming round of redistricting to be more fair and transparent than ever before, and will support future efforts to reform how districts are drawn.