Related papers: How Segregation Patterns Affect the Availability o…
This paper is to obtain a simple dividing-diagram of the congressional districts, where the only limit is that each district should contain the same population if possibly. In order to solve this problem, we introduce three different…
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…
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…
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…
Many people believe that it is disadvantageous for members aligning with a minority party to cluster in cities, as this makes it easier for the majority party to gerrymander district boundaries to diminish the representation of the…
Disparity in spatial accessibility is strongly associated with growing inequalities among urban communities. Since improving levels of accessibility for certain communities can provide them with upward social mobility and address social…
We model the societal task of redistricting political districts as a partitioning problem: Given a set of $n$ points in the plane, each belonging to one of two parties, and a parameter $k$, our goal is to compute a partition $\Pi$ of the…
Partisan gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy. Moreover, the complexity of the districting task may exceed human capacities. One potential solution is using computational models to automate the districting process by optimizing…
Half of the world population resides in cities and urban segregation is becoming a global issue. One of the best known attempts to understand it is the Schelling model, which considers two types of agents that relocate whenever a transfer…
In recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
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…
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…
U.S. metropolitan areas, particularly in the industrial Midwest and Northeast, are well-known for high levels of racial segregation. This is especially true where core cities end and suburbs begin; often crossing the street can lead to…
Algorithmic and statistical approaches to congressional redistricting are becoming increasingly valuable tools in courts and redistricting commissions for quantifying gerrymandering in the United States. While there is existing literature…
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…
Participatory budgeting is a method used by city governments to select public projects to fund based on residents' votes. Many cities use participatory budgeting at a district level. Typically, a budget is divided among districts…
Predictive algorithms are now used to help distribute a large share of our society's resources and sanctions, such as healthcare, loans, criminal detentions, and tax audits. Under the right circumstances, these algorithms can improve the…
Cities are complex systems, their complexity manifests itself through fractality of their spatial structures and by power law distributions (scaling) of multiple urban attributes. Here we report on the previously unreported manifestation of…
A phenomenon of racial segregation in U.S. cities is a multifaceted area of study. A recent advancement in this field is the development of a methodology that transforms census population count-by-race data into a grid of monoracial cells.…
The American winner-take-all congressional district system empowers politicians to engineer electoral outcomes by manipulating district boundaries. Existing computational solutions mostly focus on drawing unbiased maps by ignoring political…