Related papers: Quantifying gerrymandering using the vote distribu…
In this paper, we apply techniques of ensemble analysis to understand the political baseline for Congressional representation in Colorado. We generate a large random sample of reasonable redistricting plans and determine the partisan…
Gerrymandering is a pervasive problem within the US political system. In the past decade, methods based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and statistical outlier tests have been proposed to quantify gerrymandering and were used as…
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…
The declination is a quantitative method for identifying possible partisan gerrymanders by analyzing vote distributions. In this expository note we explain and motivate the definition of the declination. The minimal computer code required…
Assuming that partisan fairness and responsiveness are important aspects of redistricting, it is important to measure them. Many measures of partisan bias are satisfactory for states that are balanced with roughly equal proportions of…
The actions of packing and cracking are central to the construction of gerrymandered district plans. The US Supreme Court opinion in Gill v. Whitford makes clear that vote dilution arguments require showing that individual voters have been…
We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…
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…
In recent decades, state legislatures have often drawn U.S. Congressional voting districts that look---to the human eye---to be rather twisted. In this paper, we propose a method to measure how much districts "meander" via a computation of…
Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment…
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…
Recently, an increasing number of researchers, especially in the realm of political redistricting, have proposed sampling-based techniques to generate a subset of plans from the vast space of districting plans. These techniques have been…
In the process of redistricting, one important metric is the number of competitive districts, that is, districts where both parties have a reasonable chance of winning a majority of votes. Competitive districts are important for achieving…
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…
We create 4200 synthetic cities which vary in percent minority population and their residential segregation patterns. Of these, 1200 are modeled on existing cities, and 3000 are rectangular grid cities. In each city, we consider…
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
We study a model of temporal voting where there is a fixed time horizon, and at each round the voters report their preferences over the available candidates and a single candidate is selected. Prior work has adapted popular notions of…
We consider the measures of partisan symmetry proposed for practical use in the political science literature, as clarified and developed in Katz, King, and Rosenblatt (2020). Elementary mathematical manipulation shows the symmetry metrics…
Changes in political geography and electoral district boundaries shape representation in the United States Congress. To disentangle the effects of geography and gerrymandering, we generate a large ensemble of alternative redistricting plans…
Roughly speaking, gerrymandering is the systematic manipulation of the boundaries of electoral districts to make a specific (political) party win as many districts as possible. While typically studied from a geographical point of view,…