This is a guest post by Ruth Greenwood, Director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School:

With coalition claims in the election law news again, I wanted to flag an update to a resource that I shared a year ago. The tool, RPVNearMe (developed by the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School and Christopher T. Kenny) provides estimates of racially polarized voting for every county in the country. Note that the tool only offers estimates for certain statewide and federal elections — i.e., not the local appraisal you would need for VRA litigation — but it still gives a guide to possible coalition voting.

The site now includes six racial/ethnic categories: white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native, and other, for every county in the country.

You can see there are some places where multiple minority groups clearly coalition together (e.g., Virginia Beach, where I was one of the attorneys representing the Holloway plaintiffs in their successful tri-coalition (Black, Latino, and Asian voters) claim). There are also places where those three communities don’t clearly coalition vote (e.g., Kings County, New York, suggesting Black and Latino cohesive voting but not cohesive voting with Asian voters). Those charts are copied below. All the underlying data can be downloaded from the website and the code is on Github.