Related papers: Gerrymandering and computational redistricting
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
Redistricting is the problem of dividing a state into a number $k$ of regions, called districts. Voters in each district elect a representative. The primary criteria are: each district is connected, district populations are equal (or nearly…
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…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
Redistricting efforts have gathered contemporary attention in both popular and scholarly debates, particularly in the United States where efforts to redraw congressional districts to favor either of the two major parties in 12 states --…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
In many practical scenarios, a population is divided into disjoint groups for better administration, e.g., electorates into political districts, employees into departments, students into school districts, and so on. However, grouping people…
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…
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…
The boundaries of electoral constituencies for assembly and parliamentary seats are drafted using a process referred to as delimitation, which ensures fair and equal representation of all citizens. The current delimitation exercise suffers…
The American winner-take-all congressional district system empowers politicians to engineer electoral outcomes by manipulating district boundaries. Existing computational solutions mostly focus on drawing unbiased maps by ignoring political…
We study the problem of a partisan gerrymanderer who assigns voters to equipopulous districts so as to maximize his party's expected seat share. The designer faces both aggregate uncertainty (how many votes his party will receive) and…
The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…
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,…
We study the computational complexity of the map redistricting problem (gerrymandering). Mathematically, the electoral district designer (gerrymanderer) attempts to partition a weighted graph into $k$ connected components (districts) such…
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…