Related papers: Drawing Competitive Districts in Redistricting
We initiate the study of bribery problem in the context of gerrymandering and reverse gerrymandering. In our most general problem, the input is a set of voters having votes over a set of alternatives, a graph on the voters, a partition of…
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…
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…
Motivated by recent computational models for redistricting and detection of gerrymandering, we study the following problem on graph partitions. Given a graph $G$ and an integer $k\geq 1$, a $k$-district map of $G$ is a partition of $V(G)$…
We use voting precinct and election data to analyze the political geography of New Hampshire and Maine. We find that the location of dividing line between Congressional districts in both states are significantly different than what we would…
Partisan gerrymandering is a major cause for voter disenfranchisement in United States. However, convincing US courts to adopt specific measures to quantify gerrymandering has been of limited success to date. Recently, Stephanopoulos and…
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…
Does a high dispersal rate provide a competitive advantage when risking competitive exclusion? To this day, the theoretical literature cannot answer this question in full generality. The present paper focuses on the simplest mathematical…
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,…
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…
Participatory budgeting is a method used by city governments to select public projects to fund based on residents' votes. Many cities use participatory budgeting at a district level. Typically, a budget is divided among districts…
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…
The process of legislative redistricting in New Hampshire, along with many other states across the country, was particularly contentious during the 2020 census cycle. In this paper we present an ensemble analysis of the enacted districts to…
Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they influence politics. At the same time, the inherent subjectivity of neighborhoods creates methodological challenges in measuring and…
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…
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…
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 democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
In redistricting litigation, effective enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has often involved providing the court with districting plans that display a larger number of majority-minority districts than the current proposal (as was true,…