Related papers: Alleviating partisan gerrymandering: can math and …
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…
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…
Why not have a computer just draw a map? This is something you hear a lot when people talk about gerrymandering, and it's easy to think at first that this could solve redistricting altogether. But there are more than a couple problems with…
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…
Gerrymandering is the perversion of an election based on manipulation of voting district boundaries, and has been a historically important yet difficult task to analytically prove. We propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo with Simulated…
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…
Algorithmic and statistical approaches to congressional redistricting are becoming increasingly valuable tools in courts and redistricting commissions for quantifying gerrymandering in the United States. While there is existing literature…
Using the recently introduced declination function, we estimate the net number of seats won in the US House of Representatives due to asymmetries in vote distributions. Such asymmetries can arise from combinations of partisan gerrymandering…
Bizarrely shaped voting districts are frequently lambasted as likely instances of gerrymandering. In order to systematically identify such instances, researchers have devised several tests for so-called geographic compactness (i.e., shape…
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…
Proportional apportionment is the problem of assigning seats to parties according to their relative share of votes. Divisor methods are the de-facto standard solution, used in many countries. In recent literature, there are two algorithms…
Congressional district lines in many U.S. states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting…
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…
Redistricting efforts have gathered contemporary attention in both popular and scholarly debates, particularly in the United States where efforts to redraw congressional districts to favor either of the two major parties in 12 states --…
The mathematics of redistricting is an area of study that has exploded in recent years. In particular, many different research groups and expert witnesses in court cases have used outlier analysis to argue that a proposed map is a…
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.…
Motivated by putting empirical work based on (synthetic) election data on a more solid mathematical basis, we analyze six distances among elections, including, e.g., the challenging-to-compute but very precise swap distance and the distance…
The margin of victory is easy to compute for many election schemes but difficult for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This is important because arguments about the correctness of an election outcome usually rely on the size of the electoral…
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…
Decisions about how the population of the United States should be divided into legislative districts have powerful and not fully understood effects on the outcomes of elections. The problem of understanding what we might mean by "fair…