Related papers: Redistricting: Drawing the Line
This paper presents a novel mechanism to endogenously determine the fair division of a state into electoral districts in a two-party setting. No geometric constraints are imposed on voter distributions or district shapes; instead, it is…
We use causal inference to study how designing ballots with and without party designations impacts electoral outcomes when partisan voters rely on party-order cues to infer candidate affiliation in races without designations. If the party…
Decisions about how the population of the United States should be divided into legislative districts have powerful and not fully understood effects on the outcomes of elections. The problem of understanding what we might mean by "fair…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Redistricting is the problem of partitioning a set of geographical units into a fixed number of districts, subject to a list of often-vague rules and priorities. In recent years, the use of randomized methods to sample from the vast space…
Why not have a computer just draw a map? This is something you hear a lot when people talk about gerrymandering, and it's easy to think at first that this could solve redistricting altogether. But there are more than a couple problems with…
In district-based elections, electors cast votes in their respective districts. In each district, the party with maximum votes wins the corresponding seat in the governing body. The election result is based on the number of seats won by…
Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they influence politics. At the same time, the inherent subjectivity of neighborhoods creates methodological challenges in measuring and…
When auditing a redistricting plan, a persuasive method is to compare the plan with an ensemble of neutrally drawn redistricting plans. Ensembles are generated via algorithms that sample distributions on balanced graph partitions. To audit…
Connecticut passed their new state House of Representatives district plan on November 18, 2021 and passed their new state Senate district plan on November 23, 2021. Each passed unanimously in their 9-person bipartisan Reapportionment…
We examine the extent of gerrymandering for the 2010 General Assembly district map of Wisconsin. We find that there is substantial variability in the election outcome depending on what maps are used. We also found robust evidence that the…
We investigate optimization models for the purpose of computational redistricting. Our focus is on nonconvex objectives for estimating expected Black Representatives and Political Representation. The objectives are a composition of a ratio…
In many practical scenarios, a population is divided into disjoint groups for better administration, e.g., electorates into political districts, employees into departments, students into school districts, and so on. However, grouping people…
We discuss difficulties of evaluating partisan gerrymandering in the congressional districts in Utah and the failure of many common metrics in Utah. We explain why the Republican vote share in the least-Republican district (LRVS) is a good…
We introduce a general framework for exploring the problem of selecting a committee of representatives with the aim of studying a networked voting rule based on a decentralized large-scale platform, which can assure a strong accountability…
We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
Ensemble analysis has become an important tool for quantifying gerrymandering; the main idea is to generate a large, random sample of districting plans (an "ensemble") to which any proposed plan may be compared. If a proposed plan is an…
The space of connected graph partitions underlies statistical models used as evidence in court cases and reform efforts that analyze political districting plans. In response to the demands of redistricting applications, researchers have…
Racial and other demographic imputation is necessary for many applications, especially in auditing disparities and outreach targeting in political campaigns. The canonical approach is to construct continuous predictions -- e.g., based on…