Electoral Innovation Lab, Inc.

Our Mission:

To build a science of data-driven democracy reform using data, computation, and practical strategies for change. We believe that integration of scientific methods with policy research will help preserve and grow the promise of a functioning democracy in the United States.

Our Vision:

Voters gain and maintain the power to choose their elected officials instead of politicians suppressing voters’ rights to fair and meaningful representation.

Our Values:

We are nonpartisan, independent, evidence-based, and multidisciplinary. We answer honestly to data. Objective data is gathered and analyzed using sound methodology, clear processes, and transparency. All the research tactics we use to predict the implications and consequences of reform are empirically supported.

The science of democracy reform is in its infancy, but has enormous potential to help advocates win. Despite hard fought battles to protect and advance voting rights in America, gerrymandering still exists to keep elected officials in power who are more beholden to their partisan politics than to the voters who reside in their districts. A variety of reforms have been attempted, with some succeeding, some failing, and others falling short of effective implementation. These include redistricting commissions, court actions, and structural changes, such as multi-member districts.

Recent years have seen a flowering of proposals to rescue and repair democracy in addition to redistricting efforts. These include ranked-choice voting, open primaries, approval voting, and Electoral College reform to name a few. However, enthusiasm for these reforms is often driven by intuition, not evidence. In the absence of a framework for putting reforms in perspective, a danger exists that even if one reform wins, committed advocacy will be wasted because the reform is ineffective or conflicts with others in play.