Related papers: Redistricting for Proportionality
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…
We study the proportional clustering problem of Chen et al. [ICML'19] and relate it to the area of multiwinner voting in computational social choice. We show that any clustering satisfying a weak proportionality notion of Brill and Peters…
Popular centroid-based clustering methods are typically optimized for global objectives, and may fail to adequately represent large groups of datapoints. Thus, one needs proportionality notions suited for metric settings. Ideally, such…
Social choice theory offers a wealth of approaches for selecting a candidate on behalf of voters based on their reported preference rankings over options. When voters have underlying utilities for these options, however, using preference…
We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
Ensemble analysis has become an important tool for quantifying gerrymandering; the main idea is to generate a large, random sample of districting plans (an "ensemble") to which any proposed plan may be compared. If a proposed plan is an…
Proportionality is an attractive fairness concept that has been applied to a range of problems including the facility location problem, a classic problem in social choice. In our work, we propose a concept called Strong Proportionality,…
Voter suppression and associated racial disparities in access to voting are long-standing civil rights concerns in the United States. Barriers to voting have taken many forms over the decades. A history of violent explicit discouragement…
Manipulation, bribery, and control are well-studied ways of changing the outcome of an election. Many voting rules are, in the general case, computationally resistant to some of these manipulative actions. However when restricted to…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
To audit political district maps for partisan gerrymandering, one may determine a baseline for the expected distribution of partisan outcomes by sampling an ensemble of maps. One approach to sampling is to use redistricting policy as a…
We study the performance of voting mechanisms from a utilitarian standpoint, under the recently introduced framework of metric-distortion, offering new insights along three main lines. First, if $d$ represents the doubling dimension of the…
Spaces with locally varying scale of measurement, like multidimensional structures with differently scaled dimensions, are pretty common in statistics and machine learning. Nevertheless, it is still understood as an open question how to…
Gerrymandering is the perversion of an election based on manipulation of voting district boundaries, and has been a historically important yet difficult task to analytically prove. We propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo with Simulated…
The study of proportionality in multiwinner voting with approval ballots has received much attention in recent years. Typically, proportionality is captured by variants of the Justified Representation axiom, which say that cohesive groups…
Recently, scholars from law and political science have introduced metrics which use only election outcomes (and not district geometry) to assess the presence of partisan gerrymandering. The most high-profile example of such a tool is the…
In party-approval multiwinner elections the goal is to allocate the seats of a fixed-size committee to parties based on the approval ballots of the voters over the parties. In particular, each voter can approve multiple parties and each…
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…