Related papers: Political districting without geography
Roads are among the most essential components of any country's infrastructure. By facilitating the movement and exchange of people, ideas, and goods, they support economic and cultural activity both within and across local and international…
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…
Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society…
Geographic routing consists in using the position information of nodes to assist in the routing process, and has been a widely studied subject in sensor networks. One of the outstanding challenges facing geographic routing has been its…
Geographic borders are not only essential for the effective functioning of government, the distribution of administrative responsibilities and the allocation of public resources, they also influence the interregional flow of information,…
Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan…
We introduce the canonical, parameter-free, and efficiently computable notion of peel neighborhoods in a finite metric space of strict negative type. Using a soft threshold to upper bound their radius or cardinality allows peel…
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…
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…
Fairness in data-driven decision-making studies scenarios where individuals from certain population segments may be unfairly treated when being considered for loan or job applications, access to public resources, or other types of services.…
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…
Districting-and-routing is a strategic problem aiming to aggregate basic geographical units (e.g., zip codes) into delivery districts. Its goal is to minimize the expected long-term routing cost of performing deliveries in each district…
In this paper, we apply techniques of ensemble analysis to understand the political baseline for Congressional representation in Colorado. We generate a large random sample of reasonable redistricting plans and determine the partisan…
In this paper we present efficient algorithmic solutions for several constrained resource allocation, management and discovery problems. We consider new types of resource allocation models and constraints, and we present new geometric…
During the past two decades there has been a lot of interest in developing statistical depth notions that generalize the univariate concept of ranking to multivariate data. The notion of depth has also been extended to regression models and…
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
Despite location being increasingly used in decision-making systems deployed in sensitive domains such as mortgages and insurance, little attention has been paid to the unfairness that may seep in due to the correlation of location with…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
We study the setting of committee elections, where a group of individuals needs to collectively select a given size subset of available objects. This model is relevant for a number of real-life scenarios including political elections,…