Related papers: Measuring Congressional District Meandering
We investigate the geometric properties of the convex hull over $n$ successive positions of a planar random walk, with a symmetric continuous jump distribution. We derive the large $n$ asymptotic behavior of the mean perimeter. In addition,…
Gerrymandering voting districts is one of the most salient concerns of contemporary American society, and the creation of new voting maps, along with their subsequent legal challenges, speaks for much of our modern political discourse. The…
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.…
In this note we describe experiments on an implementation of two methods proposed in the literature for computing regions that correspond to a notion of order statistics for multidimensional data. Our implementation, which works for any…
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…
Current and upcoming wide-field surveys for weak gravitational lensing and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect will generate mass-selected catalogues of dark matter halos with internal or followup photometric redshift information. The angular…
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…
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…
While members of Congress now routinely communicate with constituents using images on a variety of internet platforms, little is known about how images are used as a means of strategic political communication. This is due primarily to…
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…
The polarization of political opinions among members of the U.S. legislative chambers measured by their voting records is greater today than it was thirty years ago. Previous research efforts to find causes of such increase have suggested…
In political redistricting, the compactness of a district is used as a quantitative proxy for its fairness. Several well-established, yet competing, notions of geographic compactness are commonly used to evaluate the shapes of regions,…
The margin of victory of an election is a useful measure to capture the robustness of an election outcome. It also plays a crucial role in determining the sample size of various algorithms in post election audit, polling etc. In this work,…
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…
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…
After every U.S. national census, a state legislature is required to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts in order to account for changes in population. At the moment this is done in a highly partisan way, with districting done…
The paper addresses state estimation for discrete-time systems with binary (threshold) measurements by following a Maximum A posteriori Probability (MAP) approach and exploiting a Moving Horizon (MH) approximation of the MAP cost-function.…
We study the polygons governing the convex hull of a point set created by the steps of $n$ independent two-dimensional random walkers. Each such walk consists of $T$ discrete time steps, where $x$ and $y$ increments are i.i.d. Gaussian. We…
Gerrymandering, the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is a persistent issue in U.S. redistricting cycles. This paper introduces and analyzes a new phenomenon, 'votemandering'- a strategic…
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…