Related papers: Measuring Congressional District Meandering
Examination of precinct level data in US presidential elections reveals a correlation of large precincts and increased fraction of Republican votes. The large precinct bias is analyzed with respect to voter heterogeneity and voter…
The metric of a tidally distorted, nonrotating black hole is presented in a light-cone coordinate system that penetrates the event horizon and possesses a clear geometrical meaning. The metric is expressed as an expansion in powers of r/R…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result 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…
The ability of a person to run on the surface of a suspension of cornstarch and water has fascinated scientists and the public alike. However, the constitutive relation obtained from traditional steady-state rheology of cornstarch and water…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
In eight states, a "nesting rule" requires that each state Senate district be exactly composed of two adjacent state House districts. In this paper we investigate the potential impacts of these nesting rules with a focus on Alaska, where…
Symmetry is an important composition feature by investigating similar sides inside an image plane. It has a crucial effect to recognize man-made or nature objects within the universe. Recent symmetry detection approaches used a smoothing…
This paper studies the problem of identifying directions of axial symmetry in multivariate distributions. Theoretical results are derived on how the measure or cardinality of the set of symmetry directions relates to spherical symmetry. The…
In this study, we propose a mechanical model of a plurality election based on a mean field voter model. We assume that there are three candidates in each electoral district, i.e., one from the ruling party, one from the main opposition…
In this article we study the convex hull spanned by the union of trajectories of a standard planar Brownian motion, and an independent standard planar Brownian bridge. We find exact values of the expectation of perimeter and area of such a…
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…
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…
Modeling U.S. Congressional legislation and roll-call votes has received significant attention in previous literature. However, while legislators across 50 state governments and D.C. propose over 100,000 bills each year, and on average…
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 prove that under the Jefferson--D'Hondt method of apportionment, given certain distributional assumptions regarding mean rounding residuals, as well as absence of correlations between party vote shares, district sizes (in votes), and…
The boundaries of electoral constituencies for assembly and parliamentary seats are drafted using a process referred to as delimitation, which ensures fair and equal representation of all citizens. The current delimitation exercise suffers…
Gerrymandering is a pervasive problem within the US political system. In the past decade, methods based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and statistical outlier tests have been proposed to quantify gerrymandering and were used as…
We show that rocky shorelines with fractal dimension 4/3 are conformally invariant curves by measuring the statistics of their winding angles from global high-resolution data. Such coastlines are thus statistically equivalent to the outer…
We here study the behavior of political party members aiming at identifying how ideological communities are created and evolve over time in diverse (fragmented and non-fragmented) party systems. Using public voting data of both Brazil and…