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Redistricting is the problem of partitioning a set of geographical units into a fixed number of districts, subject to a list of often-vague rules and priorities. In recent years, the use of randomized methods to sample from the vast space…
Redistricting is the problem of dividing a state into a number $k$ of regions, called districts. Voters in each district elect a representative. The primary criteria are: each district is connected, district populations are equal (or nearly…
Algorithmic and statistical approaches to congressional redistricting are becoming increasingly valuable tools in courts and redistricting commissions for quantifying gerrymandering in the United States. While there is existing literature…
The vast majority of US public school districts use school attendance boundaries to determine which student addresses are assigned to which schools. Existing work shows how redrawing boundaries can be a powerful policy lever for increasing…
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…
In representative democracy, a redistricting map is chosen to partition an electorate into districts which each elects a representative. A valid redistricting map must satisfy a collection of constraints such as being compact, contiguous,…
Gerrymandering, the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is a persistent issue in U.S. redistricting cycles. This paper introduces and analyzes a new phenomenon, 'votemandering'- a strategic…
In the process of redistricting, one important metric is the number of competitive districts, that is, districts where both parties have a reasonable chance of winning a majority of votes. Competitive districts are important for achieving…
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.…
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…
Sampling-based methods such as ReCom are widely used to audit redistricting plans for fairness, with the balanced spanning tree distribution playing a central role since it favors compact, contiguous, and population-balanced districts.…
In this paper, we apply techniques of ensemble analysis to understand the political baseline for Congressional representation in Colorado. We generate a large random sample of reasonable redistricting plans and determine the partisan…
In the design and analysis of political redistricting maps, it is often useful to be able to sample from the space of all partitions of the graph of census blocks into connected subgraphs of equal population. There are influential Markov…
We propose a method for redistricting, decomposing a geographical area into subareas, called districts, so that the populations of the districts are as close as possible and the districts are compact and contiguous. Each district is the…
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…
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…
The space of connected graph partitions underlies statistical models used as evidence in court cases and reform efforts that analyze political districting plans. In response to the demands of redistricting applications, researchers have…
In political redistricting, the compactness of a district is used as a quantitative proxy for its fairness. Several well-established, yet competing, notions of geographic compactness are commonly used to evaluate the shapes of regions,…
A crucial task in the political redistricting problem is to sample redistricting plans i.e. a partitioning of the graph of census blocks into districts. We show that Recombination [DeFord-Duchin-Solomon'21]-a popular Markov chain to sample…
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…