Related papers: Drawing Competitive Districts in Redistricting
Districting is a complex combinatorial problem that consists in partitioning a geographical area into small districts. In logistics, it is a major strategic decision determining operating costs for several years. Solving districting…
As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation…
Many schools in large urban districts have more applicants than seats. Centralized school assignment algorithms ration seats at over-subscribed schools using randomly assigned lottery numbers, non-lottery tie-breakers like test scores, or…
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.…
In district-based multi-party elections, electors cast votes in their respective districts. In each district, the party with maximum votes wins the corresponding seat in the governing body. Election Surveys try to predict the election…
In eight states, a "nesting rule" requires that each state Senate district be exactly composed of two adjacent state House districts. In this paper we investigate the potential impacts of these nesting rules with a focus on Alaska, where…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
Most US school districts draw "attendance boundaries" to define catchment areas that assign students to schools near their homes, often recapitulating neighborhood demographic segregation in schools. Focusing on elementary schools, we ask:…
In a representative democracy, the electoral process involves partitioning geographical space into districts which each elect a single representative. These representatives craft and vote on legislation, incentivizing political parties to…
Congressional district lines in many U.S. states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting…
Drafts are sequential round-robin allocation procedures for distributing heterogeneous and indivisible objects among agents subject to some priority order (e.g., allocating players' contract rights to teams in professional sports leagues).…
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…
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…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
We consider a perimeter defense problem in which a single vehicle seeks to defend a compact region from intruders in a one-dimensional environment parameterized by the perimeter size and the intruder-to-vehicle speed ratio. The intruders…
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…
Particle competition and cooperation (PCC) is a graph-based semi-supervised learning approach. When PCC is applied to interactive image segmentation tasks, pixels are converted into network nodes, and each node is connected to its k-nearest…
We study the complexity of candidate control in participatory budgeting elections. The goal of constructive candidate control is to ensure that a given candidate wins by either adding or deleting candidates from the election (in the…
To make a joint decision, agents (or voters) are often required to provide their preferences as linear orders. To determine a winner, the given linear orders can be aggregated according to a voting protocol. However, in realistic settings,…
We explore the Declination, a new metric intended to detect partisan gerrymandering. We consider instances in which each district has equal turnout, the maximum turnout to minimum turnout is bounded, and turnout is unrestricted. For each of…