Related papers: Redistricting for Proportionality
Why not have a computer just draw a map? This is something you hear a lot when people talk about gerrymandering, and it's easy to think at first that this could solve redistricting altogether. But there are more than a couple problems with…
The property of proportional representation in approval-based committee elections has appeared in the social choice literature for over a century, and is typically understood as avoiding the underrepresentation of minorities. However, we…
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…
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…
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…
We examine the extent of gerrymandering for the 2010 General Assembly district map of Wisconsin. We find that there is substantial variability in the election outcome depending on what maps are used. We also found robust evidence that the…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
In the classic apportionment problem the goal is to decide how many seats of a parliament should be allocated to each party as a result of an election. The divisor methods provide a way of solving this problem by defining a notion of…
Voting and assignment are two of the most fundamental settings in social choice theory. For both settings, random serial dictatorship (RSD) is a well-known rule that satisfies anonymity, ex post efficiency, and strategyproofness. Recently,…
The single transferable vote (STV) is a system of preferential proportional voting employed in multi-seat elections. Each ballot cast by a voter is a (potentially partial) ranking over a set of candidates. The margin of victory, or simply…
Proportional representation (PR) is often discussed in voting settings as a major desideratum. For the past century or so, it is common both in practice and in the academic literature to jump to single transferable vote (STV) as the…
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…
We study committee voting rules under ranked preferences, which map the voters' preference relations to a subset of the alternatives of predefined size. In this setting, the compatibility between proportional representation and committee…
In real-world elections where voters cast preference ballots, voters often provide only a partial ranking of the candidates. Despite this empirical reality, prior social choice literature frequently analyzes fairness criteria under the…
We describe an electoral system for distributing seats in a parliament. It gives proportionality for the political parties and close to proportionality for constituencies. The system suggested here is a version of the system used in Sweden…
We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
Multiwinner voting rules can be used to select a fixed-size committee from a larger set of candidates. We consider approval-based committee rules, which allow voters to approve or disapprove candidates. In this setting, several voting rules…
Modern sampling methods create ensembles of district maps that score well on discrete compactness scores, whereas the Polsby-Popper and other shape-based scores remain highly relevant for building fair maps and litigating unfair ones. The…
Fairness has emerged as an important concern in automated decision-making in recent years, especially when these decisions affect human welfare. In this work, we study fairness in temporally extended decision-making settings, specifically…