Related papers: Gerrymandering and Compactness: Implementation Fle…
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…
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 2016, a Wisconsin court struck down the state assembly map due to unconstitutional gerrymandering. If this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court's pending 2018 decision, it will be the fist successful political gerrymandering case in the…
When auditing a redistricting plan, a persuasive method is to compare the plan with an ensemble of neutrally drawn redistricting plans. Ensembles are generated via algorithms that sample distributions on balanced graph partitions. To audit…
The outcome of elections is strongly dependent on the districting choices, making thus possible (and frequent) the gerrymandering phenomenon, i.e.\ politicians suitably changing the shape of electoral districts in order to win 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…
Creating fair AI systems is a complex problem that involves the assessment of context-dependent bias concerns. Existing research and programming libraries express specific concerns as measures of bias that they aim to constrain or mitigate.…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
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.…
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…
The use of machine learning to guide clinical decision making has the potential to worsen existing health disparities. Several recent works frame the problem as that of algorithmic fairness, a framework that has attracted considerable…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
This note outlines three intellectually distinct but not mutually exclusive strategies for measuring partisan gerrymandering: partisan symmetry, efficiency gap, and algorithmic sampling.
Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they influence politics. At the same time, the inherent subjectivity of neighborhoods creates methodological challenges in measuring and…
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…
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…
Many classical geometric inequalities on functionals of convex bodies depend on the dimension of the ambient space. We show that this dimension dependence may often be replaced (totally or partially) by different symmetry measures of the…
Mixed-use urbanism affords access to diverse assortments of land-uses within a pedestrian-accessible context. It confers advantages such as reductions to driving, air pollution, and Body Mass Index with associated increases in active…
The efficiency gap formula was introduced in to measure political gerrymandering. It played a key role in the Gill v. Whitford case whose appeal is currently before the Supreme Court, but it was very recently shown by Bernstein and Duchin…
This past decade has seen a noticeable uptick in asymmetric election results along with the inevitable claims of gerrymandering and litigation. Research, too, has followed, giving rise to intense scrutiny of elections, where the goal is to…