Related papers: An impossibility theorem for gerrymandering
We compare and contrast fourteen measures that have been proposed for the purpose of quantifying partisan gerrymandering. We consider measures that, rather than examining the shapes of districts, utilize only the partisan vote distribution…
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing biased electoral maps that manipulate the voter population to gain an advantage. The most recent time gerrymandering became an issue was 2019 when the U.S. Federal Supreme Court decided that the…
The Possible-Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the set of candidates is partially specified, whether a distinguished candidate can become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational…
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…
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…
Motivated by the difficulty of specifying complete ordinal preferences over a large set of $m$ candidates, we study voting rules that are computable by querying voters about $t < m$ candidates. Generalizing prior works that focused on…
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 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…
There has been a recent media blitz on a cohort of mathematicians valiantly working to fix America's democratic system by combatting gerrymandering with geometry. While statistics commonly features in the courtroom (forensics, DNA analysis,…
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…
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…
Various measures can be used to estimate bias or unfairness in a predictor. Previous work has already established that some of these measures are incompatible with each other. Here we show that, when groups differ in prevalence of 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 introduce the Geography and Election Outcome (GEO) metric, a new method for identifying potential partisan gerrymanders. In contrast with currently popular methods, the GEO metric uses both geographic information about a districting plan…
Manipulation is a problem of fundamental importance in the context of voting in which the voters exercise their votes strategically instead of voting honestly to prevent selection of an alternative that is less preferred. The…
The Supreme Court's federal preemption decisions are notoriously unpredictable. Traditional left-right voting alignments break down in the face of competing ideological pulls. The breakdown of predictable voting blocs leaves the business…
We explore the Declination, a new metric intended to detect partisan gerrymandering. We consider instances in which each district has equal turnout, the maximum turnout to minimum turnout is bounded, and turnout is unrestricted. For each of…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation…
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…