Related papers: Partisan gerrymandering with geographically compac…
We introduce a non-partisan probability distribution on congressional redistricting of North Carolina which emphasizes the equal partition of the population and the compactness of districts. When random districts are drawn and the results…
What is the effectiveness of local search algorithms for geometric problems in the plane? We prove that local search with neighborhoods of magnitude $1/\epsilon^c$ is an approximation scheme for the following problems in the Euclidian…
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…
We show that a compact Riemannian manifold with weakly 1/4-pinched sectional curvatures is either locally symmetric or diffeomorphic to a space form.
Multiwinner voting rules are used to select a small representative subset of candidates or items from a larger set given the preferences of voters. However, if candidates have sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity (when selecting…
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
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…
Scoring rules are widely used to rank athletes in sports and candidates in elections. Each position in each individual ranking is worth a certain number of points; the total sum of points determines the aggregate ranking. The question is…
Network models with latent geometry have been used successfully in many applications in network science and other disciplines, yet it is usually impossible to tell if a given real network is geometric, meaning if it is a typical element in…
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…
Spatial distribution of the human population is distinctly heterogeneous, e.g. showing significant difference in the population density between urban and rural areas. In the historical perspective, i.e. on the timescale of centuries, the…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
Local convergence techniques have become a key methodology to study sparse random graphs. However, convergence of many random graph properties does not directly follow from local convergence. A notable, and important, such random graph…
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…
The process of legislative redistricting in New Hampshire, along with many other states across the country, was particularly contentious during the 2020 census cycle. In this paper we present an ensemble analysis of the enacted districts to…
Fairness in multiwinner elections, a growing line of research in computational social choice, primarily concerns the use of constraints to ensure fairness. Recent work proposed a model to find a diverse \emph{and} representative committee…
We discuss a cellular automata model to study the competition between an emergent better fitted species against an existing majority species. The model implement local fights among small group of individual and a synchronous random walk on…
An electoral spoiler is usually defined as a losing candidate whose removal would affect the outcome by changing the winner. So far, spoiler effects have been analyzed primarily for single-winner electoral systems. We consider this subject…
Historically used in settings where the outcome is rare or data collection is expensive, outcome-dependent sampling is relevant to many modern settings where data is readily available for a biased sample of the target population, such as…