Related papers: Drawing Competitive Districts in Redistricting
Examination of precinct level data in US presidential elections reveals a correlation of large precincts and increased fraction of Republican votes. The large precinct bias is analyzed with respect to voter heterogeneity and voter…
Multiwinner voting rules are used to select a small representative subset of candidates or items from a larger set given the preferences of voters. However, if candidates have sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity (when selecting…
We design and analyze a protocol for dividing a state into districts, where parties take turns proposing a division, and freezing a district from the other party's proposed division. We show that our protocol has predictable and provable…
Finding outlying elements in probability distributions can be a hard problem. Taking a real example from Voting Rights Act enforcement, we consider the problem of maximizing the number of simultaneous majority-minority districts in a…
We investigate the problem of deciding whether a given preference profile is close to having a certain nice structure, as for instance single-peaked, single-caved, single-crossing, value-restricted, best-restricted, worst-restricted,…
We compare and contrast fourteen measures that have been proposed for the purpose of quantifying partisan gerrymandering. We consider measures that, rather than examining the shapes of districts, utilize only the partisan vote distribution…
We introduce the Geography and Election Outcome (GEO) metric, a new method for identifying potential partisan gerrymanders. In contrast with currently popular methods, the GEO metric uses both geographic information about a districting plan…
An election over a finite set of candidates is called single-crossing if, as we sweep through the list of voters from left to right, the relative order of every pair of candidates changes at most once. Such elections have many attractive…
This paper presents a graph bundling algorithm that agglomerates edges taking into account both spatial proximity as well as user-defined criteria in order to reveal patterns that were not perceivable with previous bundling techniques. Each…
Sampling-based path planning algorithms usually implement uniform sampling methods to search the state space. However, uniform sampling may lead to unnecessary exploration in many scenarios, such as the environment with a few dead ends. Our…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
We introduce two models of multiwinner elections with approval preferences and labelled candidates that take the committee's diversity into account. One model aims to find a committee with maximal diversity given a scoring function (e.g. of…
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…
When selecting locations for a set of facilities, standard clustering algorithms may place unfair burden on some individuals and neighborhoods. We formulate a fairness concept that takes local population densities into account. In…
In recent decades, state legislatures have often drawn U.S. Congressional voting districts that look---to the human eye---to be rather twisted. In this paper, we propose a method to measure how much districts "meander" via a computation of…
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 Possible-Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the set of candidates is partially specified, whether a distinguished candidate can become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational…
While manipulative attacks on elections have been well-studied, only recently has attention turned to attacks that account for geographic information, which are extremely common in the real world. The most well known in the media is…
We study the competition for partners in two-sided matching markets with heterogeneous agent preferences, with a focus on how the equilibrium outcomes depend on the connectivity in the market. We model random partially connected markets,…
Ensembles of random legislative districts are a valuable tool for assessing whether a proposed district plan is an outlier or gerrymander. Expert witnesses have presented these in litigation using various methods, and unsurprisingly, they…