Partisan gerrymandering with geographically compact districts
Combinatorics
2019-07-10 v1 Metric Geometry
Probability
Physics and Society
Abstract
Bizarrely shaped voting districts are frequently lambasted as likely instances of gerrymandering. In order to systematically identify such instances, researchers have devised several tests for so-called geographic compactness (i.e., shape niceness). We demonstrate that under certain conditions, a party can gerrymander a competitive state into geographically compact districts to win an average of over 70% of the districts. Our results suggest that geometric features alone may fail to adequately combat partisan gerrymandering.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1712.05390,
title = {Partisan gerrymandering with geographically compact districts},
author = {Boris Alexeev and Dustin G. Mixon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.05390},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
12 pages, 2 figures