Strategy Overview

Research is performed by scholars, practitioners, and staff, guided by the intellectual standards of basic science. Research problems are chosen for their ability to affect democracy in real time. To guarantee efficiency, research tools pull from a variety of disciplines and utilize complex systems analysis and simulation. Interdisciplinary cooperation is critical to work fast enough to meet pressing threats to democracy. Political science is featured prominently, as well as advanced computational methods, cognitive science, computer science, mathematical simulation, and complex systems theory. EIL’s research arm produces academic papers and white papers, while also informing internal and allied development efforts.

Integration of data analytics with both research and legal scholarship is key to informing democracy reform. EIL is now able to apply ensemble modeling, cluster computing, and other computational techniques to cast-vote records and proprietary data sets. The data collected in our redistricting work will fuel scholarship related to communities of interest, racial fairness, polarization, alternative voting rules, election integrity, and other issues relating to democracy. EIL demonstrates these capabilities in electoral affairs, such as a key federal case that upheld ranked-choice voting in Maine. In the next two years, this research will expand further to address a wide array of questions about elections, environmental issues, poverty, and race in the same real-time manner as our redistricting work.

Development involves the translation of research results into practical reforms. Development consists of two parts: the consideration of specific political microenvironments and the public dissemination of information. EIL evaluates political environments and conditions to understand the efficacy of a reform and estimate the scale of its impact. Dissemination may take the form of web content, in-person conferences, consulting with stakeholders, and varied interactions with governmental nonprofit and non-partisan organizations.

Our focus is on pivotal actors, whose votes (as citizens or as legislators) are decisive in an electoral outcome. A focus on pivotal actors intersects all the work of EIL. We seek to make pivotal actors as representative of the population as possible, and thus make election outcomes responsive to the people.

The importance of pivotal actors is exemplified by the consequences of gerrymandering, which creates districts that are safe for a candidate or party. Under these circumstances, elected officials may hold more interest in maintaining political power rather than representing and acting upon the needs of voters. To address the pivotal actors in these districts, we look to those who vote in the dominant party’s primary. As a second example, general elections in the U.S. are typically decided by the conventional rule of plurality voting. Ideally, the pivotal voters are the median voters. However, the plurality rule enables spoiler effects and can reward extreme candidates who deviate far from the median.

Expansion areas are crucial to unlock the potential of our innovations. Now that our methods and tools are proven, they can be repurposed beyond a single area of democracy reform. For example, our Communities of Interest intake tool, Representable, has the capacity to become a generalized tool for aggregating geolocated public input. Our efforts can serve as a trusted nonpartisan resource to the practical work of policymakers, community activists, and scientific researchers in multiple fields. In 2021 and 2022, EIL began several projects beyond redistricting, expanding into other areas of democracy reform, such as voting rules (e.g. ranked-choice voting in Maine and open primaries in Utah) and community representation.

At a time when U.S. democracy is seriously threatened by partisan actors, it is essential to understand the impact of particular electoral rules. These rules relate to the function and integrity of political processes (redistricting, voting, campaigning) in a polarized political environment. Greater understanding of the consequences of voting rules is crucial to devise effective reforms and adapt them to specific localities.