Related papers: An analysis of the Act 43 Wisconsin Assembly distr…
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 present a new statistical test to detect that a presented state of a reversible Markov chain was not chosen from a stationary distribution. In particular, given a value function for the states of the Markov chain, we would like to…
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…
To assess the presence of gerrymandering, one can consider the shapes of districts or the distribution of votes. The "efficiency gap," which does the latter, plays a central role in a 2016 federal court case on the constitutionality of…
In 2016, a Wisconsin court struck down the state assembly map due to unconstitutional gerrymandering. If this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court's pending 2018 decision, it will be the fist successful political gerrymandering case in the…
The mathematics of redistricting is an area of study that has exploded in recent years. In particular, many different research groups and expert witnesses in court cases have used outlier analysis to argue that a proposed map is a…
We give qualitative and quantitative improvements to theorems which enable significance testing in Markov Chains, with a particular eye toward the goal of enabling strong, interpretable, and statistically rigorous claims of political…
Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…
In representative democracy, a redistricting map is chosen to partition an electorate into districts which each elects a representative. A valid redistricting map must satisfy a collection of constraints such as being compact, contiguous,…
After every U.S. national census, a state legislature is required to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts in order to account for changes in population. At the moment this is done in a highly partisan way, with districting done…
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…
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…
With the rise of machine learning and deep learning based applications in practice, monitoring, i.e. verifying that these operate within specification, has become an important practical problem. An important aspect of this monitoring is to…
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…
This preprint offers a detailed look, both qualitative and quantitative, at districting with respect to recent voting patterns in one state: Pennsylvania. We investigate how much the partisan playing field is tilted by political geography.…
Gerrymandering is the perversion of an election based on manipulation of voting district boundaries, and has been a historically important yet difficult task to analytically prove. We propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo with Simulated…
The gerrymandering problem is a worldwide problem which sets great threat to democracy and justice in district based elections. Thanks to partisan redistricting commissions, district boundaries are often manipulated to benefit incumbents.…
The recent wave of attention to partisan gerrymandering has come with a push to refine or replace the laws that govern political redistricting around the country. A common element in several states' reform efforts has been the inclusion of…
In the United States, regions are frequently divided into districts for the purpose of electing representatives. How the districts are drawn can affect who's elected, and drawing districts to give an advantage to a certain group is known as…
Gerrymandering voting districts is one of the most salient concerns of contemporary American society, and the creation of new voting maps, along with their subsequent legal challenges, speaks for much of our modern political discourse. The…