Related papers: Quantifying Gerrymandering in North Carolina
Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which…
We compare and contrast fourteen measures that have been proposed for the purpose of quantifying partisan gerrymandering. We consider measures that, rather than examining the shapes of districts, utilize only the partisan vote distribution…
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…
"Compactness," or the use of shape as a proxy for fairness, has been a long-running theme in the scrutiny of electoral districts; badly-shaped districts are often flagged as examples of the abuse of power known as gerrymandering. The most…
We investigate optimization models for the purpose of computational redistricting. Our focus is on nonconvex objectives for estimating expected Black Representatives and Political Representation. The objectives are a composition of a ratio…
We introduce simulated packing and cracking as a technique for evaluating partisan-gerrymandering measures. We apply it to historical congressional and legislative elections to evaluate four measures: partisan bias, declination, efficiency…
The space of connected graph partitions underlies statistical models used as evidence in court cases and reform efforts that analyze political districting plans. In response to the demands of redistricting applications, researchers have…
For distinguishing quantum states sampled from a fixed ensemble, the gap in bipartite and single-party distinguishability can be interpreted as a nonlocality of the ensemble. In this paper, we consider bipartite state discrimination in a…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
We investigate the prevalence of sample repetition in a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method recently introduced for political redistricting.
In legislative redistricting, most states draw their House and Senate maps separately. Ohio and Wisconsin require that their Senate districts be made with a 3:1 nesting rule, i.e., out of triplets of adjacent House districts. We seek to…
We develop effective methods for constructing an ensemble of district plans via independent sampling from a reasonable probability distribution on the space of graph partitions. We compare the performance of our algorithms to that of…
We study the complexity of (approximate) winner determination under the Monroe and Chamberlin--Courant multiwinner voting rules, which determine the set of representatives by optimizing the total (dis)satisfaction of the voters with their…
This is the documentation for generating random samples from the quantum state space in accordance with a specified distribution, associated with this webpage: http://tinyurl.com/QSampling . Ready-made samples (each with at least a million…
Common election poll reporting is often misleading as sample uncertainty is addressed insufficiently or not covered at all. Furthermore, main interest usually lies beyond the simple party shares. For a more comprehensive opinion poll and…
Redistricting is the process by which electoral district boundaries are drawn, and a common normative assumption in this process is that districts should be drawn so as to capture coherent communities of interest (COIs). While states rely…
In redistricting litigation, effective enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has often involved providing the court with districting plans that display a larger number of majority-minority districts than the current proposal (as was true,…
The colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
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…
Space filling designs are central to studying complex systems in various areas of science. They are used for obtaining an overall understanding of the behaviour of the response over the input space, model construction and uncertainty…