Related papers: Locating the representational baseline: Republican…
How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…
In the context of modern sampling methods for redistricting, we define a natural measurement of the clustering of a political party, and we study how clustering affects the expected election outcome. We first prove general results and then…
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…
Gerrymandering is a practice of manipulating district boundaries and locations in order to achieve a political advantage for a particular party. Lewenberg, Lev, and Rosenschein [AAMAS 2017] initiated the algorithmic study of a…
The United States leads the world in the number of mass shootings that occur each year, even as policy making on firearms remains polarized along party lines. In the face of increasing violence and public demand for policy action, we ask…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
The colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
State delegations are often chosen through single-member district elections, creating a tension between respecting district majorities and reflecting the statewide electorate. First-past-the-post (FPTP) follows each district's majority but…
The estimation of voting blocs is an important statistical inquiry in political science. However, the scope of these analyses is usually restricted to roll call data where individual votes are directly observed. Here, we examine a Bayesian…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…
In Hotelling's model of spatial competition, a unit mass of voters is distributed in the interval $[0,1]$ (with their location corresponding to their political persuasion), and each of $m$ candidates selects as a strategy his distinct…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
We explore the Declination, a new metric intended to detect partisan gerrymandering. We consider instances in which each district has equal turnout, the maximum turnout to minimum turnout is bounded, and turnout is unrestricted. For each of…
Currently, there is currently no effective, standardized way to identify the presence of partisan gerrymandering. A relatively newly proposed method of identification is ensemble analysis. This is done by generating a large neutral ensemble…
This study demonstrates the persistent dominance of identity based voting across democratic systems, using the United States as a primary case and comparative analyses of 19 other democracies as counterfactuals. Drawing solely on election…
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…
Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment…
In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…