Related papers: Redistricting for Proportionality
The topic of this paper is "gerrymandering", namely the curse of deliberate creations of district maps with highly asymmetric electoral outcomes to disenfranchise voters, and it has a long legal history. Measuring and eliminating…
The apportionment problem constitutes a fundamental problem in democratic societies: How to distribute a fixed number of seats among a set of states in proportion to the states' populations? This--seemingly simple--task has led to a rich…
We provide mechanisms and new metric distortion bounds for line-up elections. In such elections, a set of $n$ voters, $m$ candidates, and $\ell$ positions are all located in a metric space. The goal is to choose a set of candidates and…
Multiwinner voting rules are used to select a small representative subset of candidates or items from a larger set given the preferences of voters. However, if candidates have sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity (when selecting…
We study a model of temporal voting where there is a fixed time horizon, and at each round the voters report their preferences over the available candidates and a single candidate is selected. Prior work has adapted popular notions of…
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…
Many democratic political parties hold primary elections, which nicely reflects their democratic nature and promote, among other things, the democratic value of inclusiveness. However, the methods currently used for holding such primary…
Individual fairness, proposed by Dwork et al., is a fairness measure that is supposed to prevent the unfair treatment of individuals on the subgroup level, and to overcome the problem that group fairness measures are susceptible to…
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 colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
An important desideratum in approval-based multiwinner voting is proportionality. We study the problem of reconfiguring proportional committees: given two proportional committees, is there a transition path that consists only of…
We consider two symmetry metrics commonly used to analyze partisan gerrymandering: the Mean-Median Difference (MM) and Partisan Bias (PB). Our main results compare, for combinations of seats and votes achievable in districted elections, the…
Many real-world scenarios require the random selection of one or more individuals from a pool of eligible candidates. One example of especial social relevance refers to the legal system, in which the jurors and judges are commonly picked…
Consider the decision-making setting where agents elect a panel by expressing both positive and negative preferences. Prominently, in constitutional AI, citizens democratically select a slate of ethical preferences on which a foundation…
The basic idea of voting protocols is that nodes query a sample of other nodes and adjust their own opinion throughout several rounds based on the proportion of the sampled opinions. In the classic model, it is assumed that all nodes have…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
When auditing a redistricting plan, a persuasive method is to compare the plan with an ensemble of neutrally drawn redistricting plans. Ensembles are generated via algorithms that sample distributions on balanced graph partitions. To audit…
Finding outlying elements in probability distributions can be a hard problem. Taking a real example from Voting Rights Act enforcement, we consider the problem of maximizing the number of simultaneous majority-minority districts in a…
The goal of this paper is twofold. First and foremost, we aim to experimentally and quantitatively show that the choice of a multiwinner voting rule can play a crucial role on the way minorities are represented. We also test the possibility…
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…