Princeton Election Consortium

On Tuesday at 10:00am, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Gill vs. Whitford, which concerns extreme partisan gerrymandering. Justice Ginsburg has suggested, with some justification I think, that this could be the most important case of the Court’s term. The tone and content of oral arguments are often predictive of the outcome. I will attend in person. And of course I will be watching the leaderboard at FantasySCOTUS.

As PEC readers know, my interest arises from my analysis which offers a standard that meets legal constraints set in place by the Court. Read our amicus brief or watch our great explainer video. For a deep dive into why partisan gerrymandering has soared, see our piece in The American Prospect.

The outcome is likely to hang on the vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy. To quote Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog:

…the state’s ability to muster the five votes that it needed to put the lower court’s order on hold could bode poorly for the challengers, because one factor that the justices had to consider in making their decision was whether the state is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim. On the other hand, the case appears to have been scheduled for oral argument earlier than it might normally have been: Although the justices did not announce until June 19 that they would review Gill v. Whitford, it leapfrogged over several other cases (including two granted in February, two granted in March and one granted in April) to take a spot on the October argument calendar. That could suggest that the justices intend to try to decide the case quickly, which would in turn allow new maps to be drawn sooner even if the district court’s order is not in effect.

Attendees are not allowed to speak in the courtroom. Otherwise the bingo card above could help while the time away!

I’m pleased to say that the Princeton Gerrymandering Project has just published a new dataset of state legislative elections from 1972 to 2016. This database covers over 500 election/state/year combinations, and contains over 80,000 elections. The election results can be downloaded here, and the code can be viewed on github. The dataset is based on Carl Klarner’s candidate-level state legislative data, cleaned to remove multi-member elections and other issues, as well as Ballotpedia’s 2013 – 2016 election results.

For us, it’s a resource to analyze redistricting and gerrymandering. For you, it’s whatever you want to use it for. If you need technical assistance, please write to gerrymander@princeton.edu.

We’ll eventually combine these with information about the district maps under which each election was held. Stay tuned!

Gerrymandering comes to the forefront. See www.princeton.edu for a video about standards for extreme partisan gerrymandering that we are advocating, based on simple concepts of partisan symmetry and basic statistics. The explainer is pretty spiffy!

Want to know how gerrymandering has gotten so bad in the last few decades? Here’s a history (with numbers) in The American Prospect. A sidebar explains the math.

Finally, we have an interactive website for you to explore the offenses: gerrymander.princeton.edu. It documents Congressional and state-legislature gerrymanders, including Wisconsin Assembly, the topic of next week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Gill v. Whitford.

We hope you enjoy these explorations!

Partisan gerrymandering: when did it get worse, why, & what can courts & reformers do? New at The American Prospect, we trace the roots of an offense that has ballooned in recent decades.

Also, over at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, we’ve added state legislative data. This includes data for the Wisconsin Assembly, which is important for next week’s Supreme Court case. Thanks to Rob Whitaker!

Here’s a spiffy explainer video on how extreme partisan gerrymandering is committed, and how it can be detected by anyone who’s ever taken a basic statistics class.

Many thanks to the creatives behind this, Kyle McKernan and Danielle Alio of the Princeton University communications office. If you like their work, share it and “like” it!

From Emily Bazelon, a sharp look at partisan gerrymandering. Her thinking and analysis will resonate with fans of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

We’ll have more coverage soon, once the Supreme Court amicus filing deadline has passed…