Related papers: A discrete districting plan
We study the problem of a partisan gerrymanderer who assigns voters to equipopulous districts so as to maximize his party's expected seat share. The designer faces both aggregate uncertainty (how many votes his party will receive) and…
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…
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…
The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…
The gerrymandering problem is a worldwide problem which sets great threat to democracy and justice in district based elections. Thanks to partisan redistricting commissions, district boundaries are often manipulated to benefit incumbents.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In the computational study of political redistricting, feasibility necessitates the use of a discretization of regions such as states, counties, and towns. In nearly all cases, researchers use a dual graph, whose vertices represent small…
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…
"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…
Choices made by individuals have widespread impacts--for instance, people choose between political candidates to vote for, between social media posts to share, and between brands to purchase--moreover, data on these choices are increasingly…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
We study the computational complexity of the map redistricting problem (gerrymandering). Mathematically, the electoral district designer (gerrymanderer) attempts to partition a weighted graph into $k$ connected components (districts) such…
In the process of redistricting, one important metric is the number of competitive districts, that is, districts where both parties have a reasonable chance of winning a majority of votes. Competitive districts are important for achieving…