Our Mission

The Data and Democracy Lab (formerly MGGG Redistricting Lab) is a research group at the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University, led by PI Moon Duchin, that grew out of an informal research collective called the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group. From 2018-2024, the Lab was based in the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, where we maintain an affiliation. Together with our close collaborators, we have expertise and interests spanning mathematics (geometry, topology, discrete math, dynamics), algorithms, software development, geography, science studies, law, and policy. We research data science interventions – better mechanisms, better models, better metrics – for democracy.

Our goals are these:

• to pursue cutting-edge research in the basic science and practically relevant applications of geometry, topology, and computing to the design of democratic mechanisms, including but not limited to redistricting and ranked choice voting;
• to build open-source tools and resources that create public access and analytical power for better understanding election systems and their consequences;
• to partner with civil rights organizations to reexamine and strengthen the quantitative toolkit for protecting voting rights;
• to offer formal and informal expert consulting to stakeholders on all sides.

Highlights

• 

  Study of the 2024 STV City Council Election in Portland, Oregon

  MGGG

  01 May 2025

  The Data and Democracy lab is excited to announce the release of a report on the 2024 STV City Council Election in Portland, Oregon. In November 2022, voters in Portland, Oregon approved an overhaul to their system of election to use STV or “single transferable vote.” We analyze the mechanics of the STV election to explain that the voting system played a direct role in securing strong representation for communities of color, while several other popular systems of election would have delivered different results when faced with identical voter preferences.

• Structural Democracy Fellows

  MGGG

  19 March 2025

  The Data and Democracy Lab announces an initial cohort in the Structural Democracy Faculty Fellow Program, funded by the Crankstart Foundation.

  These 16 researchers from universities in the U.S., the U.K., and Chile are funded to build and strengthen a research community in Structural Democracy, which is meant to include a range of practically applicable areas in the study of systems of election. Topics in scope include (computational) social choice, mechanism design, computational redistricting, statistical models of elections, data visualization for elections, behavioral psychology of ranking and voting, dynamics of turnout and engagement, and the design of law and policy around voting.

• 

  Comparing Electoral Systems for the Massachusetts Legislature

  MGGG

  10 March 2025

  We are proud to announce the release of a new modeling and research report, in partnership with New America, a public policy think tank with a strong profile in the democracy space. Together, we studied the possible implications of systems change in the way the Massachusetts legislature is elected.

  We have applied a suite of statistical models to test alternative electoral systems, with a particular focus on STV — multi-member districts using ranked choice voting.

The MGGG Redistricting Lab is a nonpartisan research organization located within the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University.