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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…
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…
This paper is to obtain a simple dividing-diagram of the congressional districts, where the only limit is that each district should contain the same population if possibly. In order to solve this problem, we introduce three different…
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…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
After every U.S. national census, a state legislature is required to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts in order to account for changes in population. At the moment this is done in a highly partisan way, with districting done…
This preprint offers a detailed look, both qualitative and quantitative, at districting with respect to recent voting patterns in one state: Pennsylvania. We investigate how much the partisan playing field is tilted by political geography.…
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…
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…
Assuming that partisan fairness and responsiveness are important aspects of redistricting, it is important to measure them. Many measures of partisan bias are satisfactory for states that are balanced with roughly equal proportions of…
Switching from one electoral system to another one is frequently criticized by the opposition and is viewed as a means for the ruling party to stay in power. In particular, when the new electoral system is a parallel voting (or a…
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
In 2016, a Wisconsin court struck down the state assembly map due to unconstitutional gerrymandering. If this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court's pending 2018 decision, it will be the fist successful political gerrymandering case in the…
Redistricting efforts have gathered contemporary attention in both popular and scholarly debates, particularly in the United States where efforts to redraw congressional districts to favor either of the two major parties in 12 states --…
The boundaries of electoral constituencies for assembly and parliamentary seats are drafted using a process referred to as delimitation, which ensures fair and equal representation of all citizens. The current delimitation exercise suffers…
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…
This paper quantitatively analyzes county-level voting patterns in Wisconsin's presidential elections from 2000 to 2024. As a pivotal swing state, Wisconsin has alternated between Democratic and Republican candidates since 2012. Using data…
Decisions about how the population of the United States should be divided into legislative districts have powerful and not fully understood effects on the outcomes of elections. The problem of understanding what we might mean by "fair…
A quick count seeks to estimate the voting trends of an election and communicate them to the population on the evening of the same day of the election. In quick counts, the sampling is based on a stratified design of polling stations.…
In legislative redistricting, most states draw their House and Senate maps separately. Ohio and Wisconsin require that their Senate districts be made with a 3:1 nesting rule, i.e., out of triplets of adjacent House districts. We seek to…