Community of Interest Map Collection Project

Collection

The Community of Interest COI Map Collection Project aimed to collect COI maps submitted to legislative and congressional redistricting bodies and organizations during the 2021 redistricting cycle.

Considering COIs is required in many states as a criterion for drawing maps. To see if COIs are part of the criteria for your state, visit All About Redistricting’s state pages. Exactly how a COI is defined also varies across states, so we recommend referencing the language used to define COIs in your state, as well.

In order to analyze a proposed or enacted plan for consideration of COIs, a database of submitted COIs is necessary. Collecting COI maps is not always straightforward, however. Due to the variety of tools and formats used to create and submit COI maps, collecting and in some cases digitizing them can be difficult and time consuming. The Redistricting Data Hub took on this challenge with the intention of providing easy access to this information, and enabling analysis of maps for legal compliance and fair representation.

We worked to create a publicly available database of:

1. community of interest maps organized by state
2. the organization(s) that submitted map(s), including the number of submissions and their corresponding dates. When necessary and possible - as in the case of written testimony or maps submitted as pdfs - maps were digitized to facilitate analysis.