Related papers: Quantifying Gerrymandering in North Carolina
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
Assuming that partisan fairness and responsiveness are important aspects of redistricting, it is important to measure them. Many measures of partisan bias are satisfactory for states that are balanced with roughly equal proportions of…
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 recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
We examine the extent of gerrymandering for the 2010 General Assembly district map of Wisconsin. We find that there is substantial variability in the election outcome depending on what maps are used. We also found robust evidence that the…
Recently, an increasing number of researchers, especially in the realm of political redistricting, have proposed sampling-based techniques to generate a subset of plans from the vast space of districting plans. These techniques have been…
We use voting precinct and election data to analyze the political geography of New Hampshire and Maine. We find that the location of dividing line between Congressional districts in both states are significantly different than what we would…
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…
Ensemble analysis has become an important tool for quantifying gerrymandering; the main idea is to generate a large, random sample of districting plans (an "ensemble") to which any proposed plan may be compared. If a proposed plan is an…
In this paper, we propose to use the concept of local fairness for auditing and ranking redistricting plans. Given a redistricting plan, a deviating group is a population-balanced contiguous region in which a majority of individuals are of…
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…
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…
Ensembles of random legislative districts are a valuable tool for assessing whether a proposed district plan is an outlier or gerrymander. Expert witnesses have presented these in litigation using various methods, and unsurprisingly, they…
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…
This study introduces a new districting approach using the US Postal Service network to measure community connectivity. We combine Topological Data Analysis with Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to assess district boundaries' impact on…
We introduce a method for jointly registering ensembles of partitioned datasets in a way which is both geometrically coherent and partition-aware. Once such a registration has been defined, one can group partition blocks across datasets in…
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…
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…
This paper presents a novel mechanism to endogenously determine the fair division of a state into electoral districts in a two-party setting. No geometric constraints are imposed on voter distributions or district shapes; instead, it is…