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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…
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…
In redistricting litigation, effective enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has often involved providing the court with districting plans that display a larger number of majority-minority districts than the current proposal (as was true,…
With the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak, we characterize the nature of the growth trajectories of counties in the United States using a novel combination of spectral clustering and the correlation matrix. As the U.S. and the rest of the…
Deciding whether a political districting plan was distorted by a hidden agenda, or whether it dilutes the voting power of some group, requires a neutral baseline for comparison. Remarkably, all nine U.S. Supreme Court justices have now…
In the months leading up to political elections in the United States, forecasts are widespread and take on multiple forms, including projections of what party will win the popular vote, state ratings, and predictions of vote margins at 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…
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…
Redistricting practitioners must balance many competing constraints and criteria when drawing district boundaries. To aid in this process, researchers have developed many methods for optimizing districting plans according to one or more…
This past decade has seen a noticeable uptick in asymmetric election results along with the inevitable claims of gerrymandering and litigation. Research, too, has followed, giving rise to intense scrutiny of elections, where the goal is to…
Simulation methods have become important tools for quantifying partisan and racial bias in redistricting plans. We generalize the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm of McCartan and Imai (2023), one of the commonly used approaches.…
We create 4200 synthetic cities which vary in percent minority population and their residential segregation patterns. Of these, 1200 are modeled on existing cities, and 3000 are rectangular grid cities. In each city, we consider…
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…
Motivated by the problem of partisan gerrymandering, we introduce an electoral system for a representative democracy called democratic cellular voting, designed to make modern packing and cracking strategies irrelevant by allowing districts…
We investigate optimization models for the purpose of computational redistricting. Our focus is on nonconvex objectives for estimating expected Black Representatives and Political Representation. The objectives are a composition of a ratio…
The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to…
Cumulative probability models (CPMs) are a robust alternative to linear models for continuous outcomes. However, they are not feasible for very large datasets due to elevated running time and memory usage, which depend on the sample size,…
The efficiency gap formula was introduced in to measure political gerrymandering. It played a key role in the Gill v. Whitford case whose appeal is currently before the Supreme Court, but it was very recently shown by Bernstein and Duchin…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…