Related papers: Assessing congressional districting in Maine and N…
We introduce simulated packing and cracking as a technique for evaluating partisan-gerrymandering measures. We apply it to historical congressional and legislative elections to evaluate four measures: partisan bias, declination, efficiency…
To audit political district maps for partisan gerrymandering, one may determine a baseline for the expected distribution of partisan outcomes by sampling an ensemble of maps. One approach to sampling is to use redistricting policy as a…
Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they influence politics. At the same time, the inherent subjectivity of neighborhoods creates methodological challenges in measuring and…
We propose two opposing forces that impact the relation between electoral integrity and poverty. On the one hand, it is more costly to provide electoral integrity in states where there is more poverty due to transaction costs and…
Affective polarization and increasing social divisions affect social mixing and the spread of information across online and physical spaces, reinforcing social and electoral cleavages and influencing political outcomes. Here, using…
In the United States, regions are frequently divided into districts for the purpose of electing representatives. How the districts are drawn can affect who's elected, and drawing districts to give an advantage to a certain group is known as…
Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…
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…
The Political Districting Problem is mapped to a $q$-state Potts model in which the constraints can be written as interactions between sites or external fields acting on the system. Districting into $q$ voter districts is equivalent to…
In the design and analysis of political redistricting maps, it is often useful to be able to sample from the space of all partitions of the graph of census blocks into connected subgraphs of equal population. There are influential Markov…
We propose three novel gerrymandering algorithms which incorporate the spatial distribution of voters with the aim of constructing gerrymandered, equal-population, connected districts. Moreover, we develop lattice models of voter…
Fairness in multiwinner elections is studied in varying contexts. For instance, diversity of candidates and representation of voters are both separately termed as being fair. A common denominator to ensure fairness across all such contexts…
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…
Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…
The paper develops a general framework for constrained clustering which is based on the close connection of geometric clustering and diagrams. Various new structural and algorithmic results are proved (and known results generalized and…
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…
Acts of political violence in the continental United States have increased dramatically in the last decade. For this rise in political violence, we are interested in where and when such incidents occur: how are the locations and times of…
Generating realistic artificial preference distributions is an important part of any simulation analysis of electoral systems. While this has been discussed in some detail in the context of a single electoral district, many electoral…
The actions of packing and cracking are central to the construction of gerrymandered district plans. The US Supreme Court opinion in Gill v. Whitford makes clear that vote dilution arguments require showing that individual voters have been…
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…