Related papers: Gerrymandering and fair districting in parallel vo…
We examine the extent of gerrymandering for the 2010 General Assembly district map of Wisconsin. We find that there is substantial variability in the election outcome depending on what maps are used. We also found robust evidence that the…
Bizarrely shaped voting districts are frequently lambasted as likely instances of gerrymandering. In order to systematically identify such instances, researchers have devised several tests for so-called geographic compactness (i.e., shape…
As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation…
Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are…
Here we present \texttt{electoral\_sim}, an open-source Python framework for simulating and comparing electoral systems across diverse voter preference distributions. The framework represents voters and candidates as points in a…
We introduce the Geography and Election Outcome (GEO) metric, a new method for identifying potential partisan gerrymanders. In contrast with currently popular methods, the GEO metric uses both geographic information about a districting plan…
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…
In this paper, we propose to use the concept of local fairness for auditing and ranking redistricting plans. Given a redistricting plan, a deviating group is a population-balanced contiguous region in which a majority of individuals are 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…
Gerrymandering is a long-standing issue within the U.S. political system, and it has received scrutiny recently by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this note, we prove that deciding whether there exists a fair redistricting among legal maps is…
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…
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…
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…
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…
On the basis of a formula for calculating seat shares and natural thresholds in multidistrict elections under the Jefferson-D'Hondt system and a probabilistic model of electoral behavior based on P\'{o}lya's urn model, we propose a new…
In district-based multi-party elections, electors cast votes in their respective districts. In each district, the party with maximum votes wins the corresponding seat in the governing body. Election Surveys try to predict the election…
The map of elections framework is a methodology for visualizing and analyzing election datasets. So far, the framework was restricted to elections that have equal numbers of candidates, equal numbers of voters, and where all the (ordinal)…
In the classic apportionment problem the goal is to decide how many seats of a parliament should be allocated to each party as a result of an election. The divisor methods provide a way of solving this problem by defining a notion of…
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…
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…