Related papers: Connecticut Redistricting Analysis
Representative democracy in the United States relies on election systems that transmit votes into representatives in three key bodies: the two chambers of the federal legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and the Electoral…
The spread of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has claimed millions of lives. Automatic segmentation of lesions from CT images can assist doctors with screening, treatment, and monitoring. However, accurate segmentation of…
In eight states, a "nesting rule" requires that each state Senate district be exactly composed of two adjacent state House districts. In this paper we investigate the potential impacts of these nesting rules with a focus on Alaska, where…
Assuming that partisan fairness and responsiveness are important aspects of redistricting, it is important to measure them. Many measures of partisan bias are satisfactory for states that are balanced with roughly equal proportions of…
The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…
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…
Redistricting is the process by which electoral district boundaries are drawn, and a common normative assumption in this process is that districts should be drawn so as to capture coherent communities of interest (COIs). While states rely…
Incidence vs Cumulative Cases (ICC) curves are introduced and shown to provide a simple framework for parameter identification in the case of the most elementary epidemiological model, consisting of susceptible, infected, and removed…
Redistricting practitioners must balance many competing constraints and criteria when drawing district boundaries. To aid in this process, researchers have developed many methods for optimizing districting plans according to one or more…
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…
Most US school districts draw geographic "attendance zones" to assign children to schools based on their home address, a process that can replicate existing neighborhood racial/ethnic and socioeconomic status (SES) segregation in schools.…
Ensembles of random legislative districts are a valuable tool for assessing whether a proposed district plan is an outlier or gerrymander. Expert witnesses have presented these in litigation using various methods, and unsurprisingly, they…
Gerrymandering is a pervasive problem within the US political system. In the past decade, methods based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and statistical outlier tests have been proposed to quantify gerrymandering and were used as…
Primary law of the European Union demands that the allocation of the seats of the European Parliament between the Member States must obey the principle of degressive proportionality. The principle embodies the political aim that the more…
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…
This preprint offers a detailed look, both qualitative and quantitative, at districting with respect to recent voting patterns in one state: Pennsylvania. We investigate how much the partisan playing field is tilted by political geography.…
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 parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…
"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…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…