Related papers: Fair redistricting is hard
This paper is to obtain a simple dividing-diagram of the congressional districts, where the only limit is that each district should contain the same population if possibly. In order to solve this problem, we introduce three different…
Partisan gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy. Moreover, the complexity of the districting task may exceed human capacities. One potential solution is using computational models to automate the districting process by optimizing…
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 --…
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…
"Compactness," or the use of shape as a proxy for fairness, has been a long-running theme in the scrutiny of electoral districts; badly-shaped districts are often flagged as examples of the abuse of power known as gerrymandering. The most…
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.…
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…
In recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
Using an ensemble of redistricting plans, we evaluate whether a given political districting faithfully represents the geo-political landscape. Redistricting plans are sampled by a Monte Carlo algorithm from a probability distribution that…
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…
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…
Landau, Reid, and Yershov [A Fair Division Solution to the Problem of Redistricting, \textit{Social Choice and Welfare}, 2008] propose a protocol for drawing legislative districts based on a two player fair division process, where each…
Individual fairness, proposed by Dwork et al., is a fairness measure that is supposed to prevent the unfair treatment of individuals on the subgroup level, and to overcome the problem that group fairness measures are susceptible to…
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…
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…
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…
We model the societal task of redistricting political districts as a partitioning problem: Given a set of $n$ points in the plane, each belonging to one of two parties, and a parameter $k$, our goal is to compute a partition $\Pi$ of the…
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…
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…
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…