Related papers: Fairmandering: A column generation heuristic for f…
Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which…
"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…
Algorithmic decision making systems are ubiquitous across a wide variety of online as well as offline services. These systems rely on complex learning methods and vast amounts of data to optimize the service functionality, satisfaction of…
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 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…
Ensemble analysis has become an important tool for quantifying gerrymandering; the main idea is to generate a large, random sample of districting plans (an "ensemble") to which any proposed plan may be compared. If a proposed plan is an…
Gerrymandering voting districts is one of the most salient concerns of contemporary American society, and the creation of new voting maps, along with their subsequent legal challenges, speaks for much of our modern political discourse. The…
American democracy is currently heavily reliant on plurality in single-member districts, or PSMD, as a system of election. But public perceptions of fairness are often keyed to partisan proportionality, or the degree of congruence between…
In many practical scenarios, a population is divided into disjoint groups for better administration, e.g., electorates into political districts, employees into departments, students into school districts, and so on. However, grouping people…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
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…
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…
Redistricting is the problem of dividing a state into a number $k$ of regions, called districts. Voters in each district elect a representative. The primary criteria are: each district is connected, district populations are equal (or nearly…
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…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
Some airlines use the preferential bidding system to construct the schedules of their pilots. In this system, the pilots bid on the different activities and the schedules that lexicographically maximize the scores of the pilots according to…
The boundaries of electoral constituencies for assembly and parliamentary seats are drafted using a process referred to as delimitation, which ensures fair and equal representation of all citizens. The current delimitation exercise suffers…
Data-driven decision-making has drawn scrutiny from policy makers due to fears of potential discrimination, and a growing literature has begun to develop fair statistical techniques. However, these techniques are often specialized to one…
The most prevalent notions of fairness in machine learning are statistical definitions: they fix a small collection of pre-defined groups, and then ask for parity of some statistic of the classifier across these groups. Constraints of this…
Diversity maximization problem is a well-studied problem where the goal is to find $k$ diverse items. Fair diversity maximization aims to select a diverse subset of $k$ items from a large dataset, while requiring that each group of items be…