Related papers: Partisan gerrymandering with geographically compac…
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…
The paper develops a general framework for constrained clustering which is based on the close connection of geometric clustering and diagrams. Various new structural and algorithmic results are proved (and known results generalized and…
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…
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…
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…
The Political Districting Problem is mapped to a $q$-state Potts model in which the constraints can be written as interactions between sites or external fields acting on the system. Districting into $q$ voter districts is equivalent to…
We consider the measures of partisan symmetry proposed for practical use in the political science literature, as clarified and developed in Katz, King, and Rosenblatt (2020). Elementary mathematical manipulation shows the symmetry metrics…
We create 4200 synthetic cities which vary in percent minority population and their residential segregation patterns. Of these, 1200 are modeled on existing cities, and 3000 are rectangular grid cities. In each city, we consider…
Examination of precinct level data in US presidential elections reveals a correlation of large precincts and increased fraction of Republican votes. The large precinct bias is analyzed with respect to voter heterogeneity and voter…
We study the properties of elections that have a given position matrix (in such elections each candidate is ranked on each position by a number of voters specified in the matrix). We show that counting elections that generate a given…
Algorithmic and statistical approaches to congressional redistricting are becoming increasingly valuable tools in courts and redistricting commissions for quantifying gerrymandering in the United States. While there is existing literature…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…
This paper studies algorithmic fairness when the protected attribute is location. To handle protected attributes that are continuous, such as age or income, the standard approach is to discretize the domain into predefined groups, and…
Computing entanglement of an arbitrary bipartite or multipartite mixed state is in general not an easy task as it usually involves complex optimization. Here we show that exploiting symmetries of certain mixed states, we can compute a…
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…