Related papers: 3:1 Nesting Rules in Redistricting
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…
Kemeny's rule is one of the most studied and well-known voting schemes with various important applications in computational social choice and biology. Recently, Kemeny's rule was generalized via a set-wise approach by Gilbert et. al. This…
We discuss difficulties of evaluating partisan gerrymandering in the congressional districts in Utah and the failure of many common metrics in Utah. We explain why the Republican vote share in the least-Republican district (LRVS) is a good…
Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators' preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are…
We study the computational complexity of the map redistricting problem (gerrymandering). Mathematically, the electoral district designer (gerrymanderer) attempts to partition a weighted graph into $k$ connected components (districts) such…
Republican candidates often receive between 30 and 40 percent of the two-way vote share in statewide elections in Massachusetts. For the last three Census cycles, MA has held 9-10 seats in the House of Representatives, which means that a…
We introduce a general framework for exploring the problem of selecting a committee of representatives with the aim of studying a networked voting rule based on a decentralized large-scale platform, which can assure a strong accountability…
One of the most influential recent results in network analysis is that many natural networks exhibit a power-law or log-normal degree distribution. This has inspired numerous generative models that match this property. However, more recent…
Distributions of triplets in some genetic sequences are examined and found to be well described by a 2-parameter Markov process with a sparse transition matrix. The variances of all the relevant parameters are not large, indicating that…
The triad census is an important approach to understand local structure in network science, providing comprehensive assessments of the observed relational configurations between triples of actors in a network. However, researchers are often…
Randomized algorithms sometimes employ a restart strategy. After a certain number of steps, the current computation is aborted and restarted with a new, independent random seed. In some cases, this results in an improved overall expected…
How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…
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…
This paper describes Census, a protocol for data aggregation and statistical counting in MANETs. Census operates by circulating a set of tokens in the network using biased random walks such that each node is visited by at least one token.…
The Constitutionally mandated task of assigning Congressional seats to the various U.S. States proportional to their represented populations ("according to their numbers") has engendered much contention, but rather less consensus. Using the…
Recently, an increasing number of researchers, especially in the realm of political redistricting, have proposed sampling-based techniques to generate a subset of plans from the vast space of districting plans. These techniques have been…
This paper deals with randomized polling of a social network. In the case of forecasting the outcome of an election between two candidates A and B, classical intent polling asks randomly sampled individuals: who will you vote for?…
Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…
We investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st--108th Congresses, with the committees connected by ``interlocks'' or common membership. We examine the…
Map makers have long searched for a way to construct cartograms -- maps in which the sizes of geographic regions such as countries or provinces appear in proportion to their population or some other analogous property. Such maps are…