Related papers: Evaluating Partisan Gerrymandering in Wisconsin
In legislative redistricting, most states draw their House and Senate maps separately. Ohio and Wisconsin require that their Senate districts be made with a 3:1 nesting rule, i.e., out of triplets of adjacent House districts. We seek to…
Using the recently introduced declination function, we estimate the net number of seats won in the US House of Representatives due to asymmetries in vote distributions. Such asymmetries can arise from combinations of partisan gerrymandering…
Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which…
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…
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…
Currently, there is currently no effective, standardized way to identify the presence of partisan gerrymandering. A relatively newly proposed method of identification is ensemble analysis. This is done by generating a large neutral ensemble…
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…
We discuss difficulties of evaluating partisan gerrymandering in the congressional districts in Utah and the failure of many common metrics in Utah. We explain why the Republican vote share in the least-Republican district (LRVS) is a good…
In political redistricting, the compactness of a district is used as a quantitative proxy for its fairness. Several well-established, yet competing, notions of geographic compactness are commonly used to evaluate the shapes of regions,…
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…
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…
Geographical considerations such as contiguity and compactness are necessary elements of political districting in practice. Yet an analysis of the problem without such constraints yields mathematical insights that can inform real-world…
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…
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…
The topic of this paper is "gerrymandering", namely the curse of deliberate creations of district maps with highly asymmetric electoral outcomes to disenfranchise voters, and it has a long legal history. Measuring and eliminating…
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…
Redistricting is the process by which electoral district boundaries are drawn, and a common normative assumption in this process is that districts should be drawn so as to capture coherent communities of interest (COIs). While states rely…
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…
"Compactness," or the use of shape as a proxy for fairness, has been a long-running theme in the scrutiny of electoral districts; badly-shaped districts are often flagged as examples of the abuse of power known as gerrymandering. The most…
The process of legislative redistricting in New Hampshire, along with many other states across the country, was particularly contentious during the 2020 census cycle. In this paper we present an ensemble analysis of the enacted districts to…