Princeton
Princeton’s Sam Wang has the rare distinction of being a recognized authority in two completely different disciplines. On the one hand, he is a prominent neuroscientist, primarily working on how brains learn from sensory experience. But he’s also a well-known elections forecaster and expert on the mathematical side of elections, working on applying quantitative methods to questions about gerrymandering in addition to his forecasting work.
We work with Professor Wang on digital footprint for the political side of his work, designing and developing the Princeton Elections Consortium site and recently having taken over development work on the Gerrymandering Project.
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Princeton Election Consortium
Professor Wang’s work is used by major elections forecasters - like the New York Times - to help to inform their own models for predicting voting results. And in the run-up to every major federal election, Sam starts publishing heavily quantitative work about possible outcomes. You can see his retrospective on how PEC did on the 2022 midterms here as a compelling example.
Given his important work on gerrymandering and fairness in elections, we made Sam’s PEC site pro bono. His two most important requests:
Nothing fancy. Keep it looking like a newspaper as much as possible.
Make sure to include the distinctive American bug. (You really need to look at the site to see what we mean.)
We took the first request to heart backend and front - we made it easy to manage and update, so Sam and his researchers don’t need to do too much messing around to get it started for each election season.
Princeton Gerrymandering Project
Given Sam’s mathematical bent and strong sense of fairness, it’s no surprise that he also works on gerrymandering in the US. (As of March 2024, he’s currently an expert witness in a case in New Jersey on the topic.) He does that work through the Gerrymandering Project, producing a variety of infographic maps and report cards for each of the states.
We haven’t got the chance to redesign them (yet!), but we’ve made the process of updating them much, much smoother and improved site stability and the mobile experience substantially.
