Related papers: Redistricting: Drawing the Line
Permanent citizens' assemblies are ongoing deliberative bodies composed of randomly selected citizens, organized into panels that rotate over time. Unlike one-off panels, which represent the population in a single snapshot, permanent…
Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are…
Liquid democracy with ranked delegations is a novel voting scheme that unites the practicability of representative democracy with the idealistic appeal of direct democracy: Every voter decides between casting their vote on a question at…
Divisor methods are well known to satisfy house monotonicity, which allows representative seats to be allocated sequentially. We focus on stationary divisor methods defined by a rounding cutpoint $c \in [0,1]$. For such methods with…
Gerrymandering is a long-standing issue within the U.S. political system, and it has received scrutiny recently by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this note, we prove that deciding whether there exists a fair redistricting among legal maps is…
We show how to use automated computation of election margins to assess the number of votes that would need to change in order to alter a parliamentary outcome for single-member preferential electorates. In the context of increasing…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
We propose new methods of electoral statistics. With their help, we study transcripts of vote counting in municipal elections. We construct and apply effective statistical tests to detect the ballot stuffing at the level of individual…
Liquid democracy is a novel paradigm for collective decision-making that gives agents the choice between casting a direct vote or delegating their vote to another agent. We consider a generalization of the standard liquid democracy setting…
Cooperation in the form of vote trading, also known as logrolling, is central for law-making processes, shaping the development of democratic societies. Empirical evidence of logrolling is scarce and limited to highly specific situations…
In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…
We explore the possibility of discovering extreme voting patterns in the U.S. Congressional voting records by drawing ideas from the mixture of contaminated normal distributions. A mixture of latent trait models via contaminated normal…
How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…
The vast majority of US public school districts use school attendance boundaries to determine which student addresses are assigned to which schools. Existing work shows how redrawing boundaries can be a powerful policy lever for increasing…
On the basis of a formula for calculating seat shares and natural thresholds in multidistrict elections under the Jefferson-D'Hondt system and a probabilistic model of electoral behavior based on P\'{o}lya's urn model, we propose a new…
Generating realistic artificial preference distributions is an important part of any simulation analysis of electoral systems. While this has been discussed in some detail in the context of a single electoral district, many electoral…
Online advertising on platforms such as Google or Facebook has become an indispensable outreach tool, including for applications where it is desirable to engage different demographics in an equitable fashion, such as hiring, housing, civic…
Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…
Despite well-documented consequences of the U.S. government's 1930s housing policies on racial wealth disparities, scholars have struggled to quantify its precise financial effects due to the inaccessibility of historical property appraisal…
Redistricting practitioners must balance many competing constraints and criteria when drawing district boundaries. To aid in this process, researchers have developed many methods for optimizing districting plans according to one or more…