Related papers: A Cut-And-Choose Mechanism to Prevent Gerrymanderi…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Researchers and legislators alike continue the search for methods of drawing fair districting plans. A districting plan is a partition of a state's subdivisions (e.g. counties, voting precincts, etc.). By modeling these districting plans as…
Deciding whether a political districting plan was distorted by a hidden agenda, or whether it dilutes the voting power of some group, requires a neutral baseline for comparison. Remarkably, all nine U.S. Supreme Court justices have now…
Classic cake-cutting algorithms enable people with different preferences to divide among them a heterogeneous resource (``cake''), such that the resulting division is fair according to each agent's individual preferences. However, these…
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 the classic apportionment problem the goal is to decide how many seats of a parliament should be allocated to each party as a result of an election. The divisor methods provide a way of solving this problem by defining a notion of…
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…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
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,…
We explore the Declination, a new metric intended to detect partisan gerrymandering. We consider instances in which each district has equal turnout, the maximum turnout to minimum turnout is bounded, and turnout is unrestricted. For each of…
Partitioning a region into districts to favor a particular candidate or a party is commonly known as gerrymandering. In this paper, we investigate the gerrymandering problem in graph theoretic setting as proposed by Cohen-Zemach et al.…
We describe an electoral system for distributing seats in a parliament. It gives proportionality for the political parties and close to proportionality for constituencies. The system suggested here is a version of the system used in Sweden…
In the United States, regions are frequently divided into districts for the purpose of electing representatives. How the districts are drawn can affect who's elected, and drawing districts to give an advantage to a certain group is known as…
Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are…
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…
Socioeconomic segregation often arises in school districting and other contexts, causing some groups to be over- or under-represented within a particular district. This phenomenon is closely linked with disparities in opportunities and…
Here we present \texttt{electoral\_sim}, an open-source Python framework for simulating and comparing electoral systems across diverse voter preference distributions. The framework represents voters and candidates as points in a…
We consider a distributed voting problem with a set of agents that are partitioned into disjoint groups and a set of obnoxious alternatives. Agents and alternatives are represented by points in a metric space. The goal is to compute the…
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…
This preprint offers a detailed look, both qualitative and quantitative, at districting with respect to recent voting patterns in one state: Pennsylvania. We investigate how much the partisan playing field is tilted by political geography.…