Related papers: Political districting without geography
Partisan gerrymandering is a major cause for voter disenfranchisement in United States. However, convincing US courts to adopt specific measures to quantify gerrymandering has been of limited success to date. Recently, Stephanopoulos and…
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…
Why not have a computer just draw a map? This is something you hear a lot when people talk about gerrymandering, and it's easy to think at first that this could solve redistricting altogether. But there are more than a couple problems with…
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…
Cities and metropolitan areas are major drivers of creativity and innovation in all possible sectors: scientific, technological, social, artistic, etc. The critical concentration and proximity of diverse mindsets and opportunities,…
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…
Does a high dispersal rate provide a competitive advantage when risking competitive exclusion? To this day, the theoretical literature cannot answer this question in full generality. The present paper focuses on the simplest mathematical…
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…
Recently, a proposal has been advanced to detect unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering with a simple formula called the efficiency gap. The efficiency gap is now working its way towards a possible landmark case in the Supreme Court. This…
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…
This paper studies algorithmic fairness when the protected attribute is location. To handle protected attributes that are continuous, such as age or income, the standard approach is to discretize the domain into predefined groups, and…
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…
While manipulative attacks on elections have been well-studied, only recently has attention turned to attacks that account for geographic information, which are extremely common in the real world. The most well known in the media is…
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…
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…
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…
Changes in political geography and electoral district boundaries shape representation in the United States Congress. To disentangle the effects of geography and gerrymandering, we generate a large ensemble of alternative redistricting plans…
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…
Redistricting efforts have gathered contemporary attention in both popular and scholarly debates, particularly in the United States where efforts to redraw congressional districts to favor either of the two major parties in 12 states --…
This note outlines three intellectually distinct but not mutually exclusive strategies for measuring partisan gerrymandering: partisan symmetry, efficiency gap, and algorithmic sampling.