Related papers: Evaluating Partisan Gerrymandering in Wisconsin
The colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
This article expands on the redistricting algorithm proposed by Chen and Rodden (2015) for states with fewer than eight congressional districts, populations highly concentrated in urban areas, or state laws that require preservation of…
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…
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…
Deciding whether a political districting plan was distorted by a hidden agenda, or whether it dilutes the voting power of some group, requires a neutral baseline for comparison. Remarkably, all nine U.S. Supreme Court justices have now…
In the design and analysis of political redistricting maps, it is often useful to be able to sample from the space of all partitions of the graph of census blocks into connected subgraphs of equal population. There are influential Markov…
This paper presents a novel mechanism to endogenously determine the fair division of a state into electoral districts in a two-party setting. No geometric constraints are imposed on voter distributions or district shapes; instead, it is…
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)…
When auditing a redistricting plan, a persuasive method is to compare the plan with an ensemble of neutrally drawn redistricting plans. Ensembles are generated via algorithms that sample distributions on balanced graph partitions. To audit…
Recently, a proposal has been advanced to detect unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering with a simple formula called the efficiency gap. The efficiency gap is now working its way towards a possible landmark case in the Supreme Court. This…
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…
This paper is to obtain a simple dividing-diagram of the congressional districts, where the only limit is that each district should contain the same population if possibly. In order to solve this problem, we introduce three different…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan…
The efficiency gap formula was introduced in to measure political gerrymandering. It played a key role in the Gill v. Whitford case whose appeal is currently before the Supreme Court, but it was very recently shown by Bernstein and Duchin…
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…
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…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
We introduce a novel partial differential equations approach for addressing the problem of partisan gerrymandering. Our method is based on volume preserving curvature flow, a partial differential equation which we adapt to smooth voting…
Decisions about how the population of the United States should be divided into legislative districts have powerful and not fully understood effects on the outcomes of elections. The problem of understanding what we might mean by "fair…