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Three maps of the United States showing states in red, blue, and purple.

Remaking a Major Guide to Redistricting

Loyola Law School

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GreenInfo team: Dan Rademacher, Gregor Allensworth, Maria Lamadrid, Tim Sinnott, Tom Allnutt

Project years: 2020-2022

Map of the United States showing how the lines are drawn in each state.
Map of the United States with controls for viewing different redistricting years and lavels, across Congress and State upper and lower houses.

Overview

What challenges is this project trying to solve?

  • Before the national redistricting process after the 2020 U.S. Census, leading redistricting expert Justin Levitt needed to revitalize and rebuild his All About Redistricting website, which was a go-to source of information for the 2010 cycle.
  • The site contains extensive information for every state at multiple levels, and the information needs to be understandable and usable by advocates, journalists, and others involved in the redistricting process.
  • Once the redistricting process started in 2020, there would be intense activity for several years, and Justin wanted to be able to update the site on his own.

What were the client’s objectives?

  • A complete new website that is easy to use and comprehensive, with both new and archival content.
  • A site structure that helps people navigate extensive and complex data across states and through time.
  • Documented methods for non-developers to update all the data and content on the site.

Results

  • The new site launched in 2020 with complete and accurate data, ready for most active period of redistricting
  • The client and their team were able to consistently update the website with the latest information across all states as the process unfolded.
  • In 2021 and 2022, we developed additional features to visualize redistricting over time and allow for comparisons of multiple draft maps as they were contested in court.
Map of the United States showing how the lines are drawn in each state.
Map of the United States with controls for viewing different redistricting years and lavels, across Congress and State upper and lower houses.

The Work

User Research and Design

We started with a range of user interviews with journalists, advocates, and lawyers, who make up the key audiences who use All About Redistricting in their work. Based on our findings from those interviews, plus an inventory of the existing site — and our client’s deep and ongoing collaboration — we developed an elegant, modern, and simple site design, with a modular architecture that prizes both accessibility and easy reuse of components in different parts of the site.

The heart of the site are the state pages and the cases section. The fifty state pages provide an overview of the current status, a list of recent updates, and a deep dive into current and past district maps, as well as a detailed explanation of the policies and practices in that state. We also list and link to the relevant court cases for that state. Those cases in turn form a searchable database of case law, and then each case page in turn presents a full annotated history of the legal documents for each case, as well as interactive versions of any relevant district maps that were part of the litigation.

Development

We built the application entirely in WordPress, giving the client full control over content, with a CSV component to drive the data for the State Pages. We also have a fully documented process for the client team to process and simplify spatial files for district maps.