Related papers: Fair redistricting is hard
The recent wave of attention to partisan gerrymandering has come with a push to refine or replace the laws that govern political redistricting around the country. A common element in several states' reform efforts has been the inclusion of…
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…
We explore the fairness of a redistricting game introduced by Mixon and Villar, which provides a two-party protocol for dividing a state into electoral districts, without the participation of an independent authority. We analyze the game in…
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…
In this paper, we apply techniques of ensemble analysis to understand the political baseline for Congressional representation in Colorado. We generate a large random sample of reasonable redistricting plans and determine the partisan…
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…
This paper investigates why and when the edge-based districting problem becomes computationally intractable. The overall problem is represented as an exact mathematical programming formulation consisting of an objective function and several…
We initiate the study of bribery problem in the context of gerrymandering and reverse gerrymandering. In our most general problem, the input is a set of voters having votes over a set of alternatives, a graph on the voters, a partition of…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
We study the fair k-set selection problem where we aim to select $k$ sets from a given set system such that the (weighted) occurrence times that each element appears in these $k$ selected sets are balanced, i.e., the maximum (weighted)…
We use voting precinct and election data to analyze the political geography of New Hampshire and Maine. We find that the location of dividing line between Congressional districts in both states are significantly different than what we would…
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.…
Sampling-based methods such as ReCom are widely used to audit redistricting plans for fairness, with the balanced spanning tree distribution playing a central role since it favors compact, contiguous, and population-balanced districts.…
The Possible-Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the set of candidates is partially specified, whether a distinguished candidate can become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational…
The process of legislative redistricting in New Hampshire, along with many other states across the country, was particularly contentious during the 2020 census cycle. In this paper we present an ensemble analysis of the enacted districts to…
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,…
We study the computational problem of computing a fair means clustering of discrete vectors, which admits an equivalent formulation as editing a colored matrix into one with few distinct color-balanced rows by changing at most $k$ values.…
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…
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…
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…