Related papers: Redistricting: Drawing the Line
Partisan gerrymandering is a major cause for voter disenfranchisement in United States. However, convincing US courts to adopt specific measures to quantify gerrymandering has been of limited success to date. Recently, Stephanopoulos and…
While members of Congress now routinely communicate with constituents using images on a variety of internet platforms, little is known about how images are used as a means of strategic political communication. This is due primarily to…
Many people believe that it is disadvantageous for members aligning with a minority party to cluster in cities, as this makes it easier for the majority party to gerrymander district boundaries to diminish the representation of the…
Gerrymandering is a practice of manipulating district boundaries and locations in order to achieve a political advantage for a particular party. Lewenberg, Lev, and Rosenschein [AAMAS 2017] initiated the algorithmic study of a…
We propose a method for redistricting, decomposing a geographical area into subareas, called districts, so that the populations of the districts are as close as possible and the districts are compact and contiguous. Each district is the…
This study introduces a new districting approach using the US Postal Service network to measure community connectivity. We combine Topological Data Analysis with Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to assess district boundaries' impact on…
The United States spends more than $1B each year on initiatives such as the American Community Survey (ACS), a labor-intensive door-to-door study that measures statistics relating to race, gender, education, occupation, unemployment, and…
Citizens' assemblies are an increasingly influential form of deliberative democracy, where randomly selected people discuss policy questions. The legitimacy of these assemblies hinges on their representation of the broader population, but…
We study the problem of a partisan gerrymanderer who assigns voters to equipopulous districts so as to maximize his party's expected seat share. The designer faces both aggregate uncertainty (how many votes his party will receive) and…
This paper quantitatively analyzes county-level voting patterns in Wisconsin's presidential elections from 2000 to 2024. As a pivotal swing state, Wisconsin has alternated between Democratic and Republican candidates since 2012. Using data…
Sortition is the practice of delegating public decision-making to randomly selected panels. Recently, it has gained momentum worldwide through its use in citizens' assemblies, sparking growing interest within the computer science community.…
We present a new model that describes the process of electing a group of representatives (e.g., a parliament) for a group of voters. In this model, called the voting committee model, the elected group of representatives runs a number of…
The study of fairness in multiwinner elections focuses on settings where candidates have attributes. However, voters may also be divided into predefined populations under one or more attributes (e.g., "California" and "Illinois" populations…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
In citizens' assemblies, a group of constituents is randomly selected to weigh in on policy issues. We study a two-stage sampling problem faced by practitioners in countries such as Germany, in which constituents' contact information is…
The paper develops a general framework for constrained clustering which is based on the close connection of geometric clustering and diagrams. Various new structural and algorithmic results are proved (and known results generalized and…
In recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
The polarization of political opinions among members of the U.S. legislative chambers measured by their voting records is greater today than it was thirty years ago. Previous research efforts to find causes of such increase have suggested…
A citizens' assembly is a group of people who are randomly selected to represent a larger population in a deliberation. While this approach has successfully strengthened democracy, it has certain limitations that suggest the need for…
Citizens' assemblies need to represent subpopulations according to their proportions in the general population. These large committees are often constructed in an online fashion by contacting people, asking for the demographic features of…