Related papers: Impartial redistricting: a Markov chain approach t…
Motivated by the problem of partisan gerrymandering, we introduce an electoral system for a representative democracy called democratic cellular voting, designed to make modern packing and cracking strategies irrelevant by allowing districts…
Inverse optimization has received much attention in recent years, but little literature exists for solving generalized mixed integer inverse optimization. We propose a new approach for solving generalized mixed-integer inverse optimization…
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…
Using an ensemble of redistricting plans, we evaluate whether a given political districting faithfully represents the geo-political landscape. Redistricting plans are sampled by a Monte Carlo algorithm from a probability distribution that…
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently deliberating over whether a proposed mathematical formula should be used to detect unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering. We show that in some cases, this formula will only flag bizarrely shaped…
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…
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…
In a representative democracy, the electoral process involves partitioning geographical space into districts which each elect a single representative. These representatives craft and vote on legislation, incentivizing political parties to…
Markov chains based on spanning trees have been hugely influential in algorithms for assessing fairness in political redistricting. The input graph represents the geographic building blocks of a jurisdiction. The goal is to output a large…
Roughly speaking, gerrymandering is the systematic manipulation of the boundaries of electoral districts to make a specific (political) party win as many districts as possible. While typically studied from a geographical point of view,…
Switching from one electoral system to another one is frequently criticized by the opposition and is viewed as a means for the ruling party to stay in power. In particular, when the new electoral system is a parallel voting (or a…
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…
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…
In this paper, we apply techniques of ensemble analysis to understand the political baseline for Congressional representation in Colorado. We generate a large random sample of reasonable redistricting plans and determine the partisan…
Congressional district lines in many U.S. states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting…
Many applications in network analysis require algorithms to sample uniformly at random from the set of all graphs with a prescribed degree sequence. We present a Markov chain based approach which converges to the uniform distribution of all…
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…
We design and analyze a protocol for dividing a state into districts, where parties take turns proposing a division, and freezing a district from the other party's proposed division. We show that our protocol has predictable and provable…
Partitioning a region into districts to favor a particular candidate or a party is commonly known as gerrymandering. In this paper, we investigate the gerrymandering problem in graph theoretic setting as proposed by Cohen-Zemach et al.…
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…