Related papers: Quantifying gerrymandering using the vote distribu…
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…
We introduce a non-partisan probability distribution on congressional redistricting of North Carolina which emphasizes the equal partition of the population and the compactness of districts. When random districts are drawn and the results…
We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a…
We initiate the study of bribery problem in the context of gerrymandering and reverse gerrymandering. In our most general problem, the input is a set of voters having votes over a set of alternatives, a graph on the voters, a partition of…
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…
The apportionment problem constitutes a fundamental problem in democratic societies: How to distribute a fixed number of seats among a set of states in proportion to the states' populations? This--seemingly simple--task has led to a rich…
Elections and opinion polls often have many candidates, with the aim to either rank the candidates or identify a small set of winners according to voters' preferences. In practice, voters do not provide a full ranking; instead, each voter…
The paper considers a general model of electoral systems combining district-based elections with a compensatory mechanism in order to create any outcome between strictly majoritarian and purely proportional seat allocation. It contains vote…
Apportionment is the problem of distributing $h$ indivisible seats across states in proportion to the states' populations. In the context of the US House of Representatives, this problem has a rich history and is a prime example of…
Representative democracy in the United States relies on election systems that transmit votes into representatives in three key bodies: the two chambers of the federal legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and the Electoral…
In redistricting litigation, effective enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has often involved providing the court with districting plans that display a larger number of majority-minority districts than the current proposal (as was true,…
We use voting precinct and election data to analyze the political geography of New Hampshire and Maine. We find that the location of dividing line between Congressional districts in both states are significantly different than what we would…
Many democratic political parties hold primary elections, which nicely reflects their democratic nature and promote, among other things, the democratic value of inclusiveness. However, the methods currently used for holding such primary…
Winner selection by majority, in an election between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when the candidates are three or more and the voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no…
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…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
The map of elections framework is a methodology for visualizing and analyzing election datasets. So far, the framework was restricted to elections that have equal numbers of candidates, equal numbers of voters, and where all the (ordinal)…
To audit political district maps for partisan gerrymandering, one may determine a baseline for the expected distribution of partisan outcomes by sampling an ensemble of maps. One approach to sampling is to use redistricting policy as a…
In network science, identifying optimal partitions of a signed network into internally cohesive and mutually divisive clusters based on generalized balance theory is computationally challenging. We reformulate and generalize two binary…
Republican candidates often receive between 30 and 40 percent of the two-way vote share in statewide elections in Massachusetts. For the last three Census cycles, MA has held 9-10 seats in the House of Representatives, which means that a…