What is PlanScore?

We are legal, political science, and mapping technology experts tackling the challenge of making redistricting fair and easy to understand. With the help of code and data from election experts around the country, we are building a service to score and publish district plans for all 50 states on an easy-to-use website.

To assist legislative staff when creating new plans, any geographic file uploaded by site visitors can be checked for its partisan, demographic, racial, and geometric features and optionally have its results shared publicly.

To help voters and journalists understand the characteristics of new plans, the comprehensive results for any plan proposed by a legislative majority can be referenced, shared, and linked in articles or social media.

To provide historical context for the partisan asymmetries of today’s plans, enacted maps all the way back to the 1970s will be scored and made available to site visitors.

Who is PlanScore?

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Ruth Greenwood

Ruth is the Director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School. She engages in litigation and advocacy on a variety of election law cases, while training the next generation of election lawyers. Along with co-counsel, Ruth represented the plaintiffs in two partisan gerrymandering cases before the Supreme Court (Gill v. Whitford and LWVNC v. Rucho).

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Simon Jackman

Simon is the Chief Executive Officer at the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to that he was a professor of political science and statistics at Stanford University. His teaching and research centers on public opinion, election campaigns, political participation, and electoral systems. Simon has been the expert witness in two partisan gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford and LWVNC v. Rucho).

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Eric McGhee

Eric is a political scientist who focuses on elections, legislative behavior, political reform, and public opinion. His research has appeared in numerous high-profile academic journals and media outlets. He is a leading expert on redistricting, and is the inventor of the efficiency gap and co-creator (with Nick Stephanopoulos) of a proposed legal test based on the metric. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Michal Migurski

Executive Director

Michal has been a leader in open source geospatial software and data in many organizations, as technical director of National Design Award-winning mapping and data visualization studio Stamen and Chief Technology Officer at government technology non-profit Code for America.

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Nicholas Stephanopoulos

Nicholas is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. His work is particularly focused on the intersection of democratic theory, empirical political science, and the American electoral system. Nicholas co-authored the original law review article on the efficiency gap with Eric McGhee, and was co-counsel for the plaintiffs in two partisan gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford and LWVNC v. Rucho).

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Chris Warshaw

Chris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. His research focuses on political representation, elections, and public opinion. He has co-authored two articles on partisan gerrymandering. He is currently working on a book that assesses the effect of gerrymandering on democratic representation in the American states. He has also worked as an expert witness in three partisan gerrymandering court cases.

PlanScore is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. PlanScore's EIN is 83-1367310

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Updates to statistics and visualizations to the PlanScore website are developed in partnership with the Harvard Election Law Clinic.

GreenInfo Network served as the first fiscal sponsor for PlanScore and also developed the first version of the website and the brand identity, with Ison Design. GreenInfo is a nonprofit organization that creates, analyzes, visualizes, and communicates information in the public interest. They have served as design and development consultants for numerous redistricting projects, in addition to decades of work mapping public lands, park equity, public health, climate resilience, and other critical issues.

During the 2021/2022 redistricting cycle, PlanScore was supported by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center (CLC), a national nonprofit organization that fights for every American’s right to participate in the democratic process. CLC advocates for fair maps and often serves as a resource for the media to understand how the redistricting cycle affects communities of interest.