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Inspired by the word game Ghost, we propose a new protocol for bipartisan redistricting in which partisan players take turns assigning precincts to districts. We prove that in an idealized setting, if both parties have the same number…
Bizarrely shaped voting districts are frequently lambasted as likely instances of gerrymandering. In order to systematically identify such instances, researchers have devised several tests for so-called geographic compactness (i.e., shape…
To assess the presence of gerrymandering, one can consider the shapes of districts or the distribution of votes. The "efficiency gap," which does the latter, plays a central role in a 2016 federal court case on the constitutionality 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…
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…
Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which…
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…
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…
Gerrymandering is a long-standing issue within the U.S. political system, and it has received scrutiny recently by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this note, we prove that deciding whether there exists a fair redistricting among legal maps is…
Large-scale institutional changes require strong commitment and involvement of all stakeholders. We use the standard framework of cooperative game theory developed by Ichiishi (1983, pp. 78-149) to: (i) establish analytically the difference…
We discuss difficulties of evaluating partisan gerrymandering in the congressional districts in Utah and the failure of many common metrics in Utah. We explain why the Republican vote share in the least-Republican district (LRVS) is a good…
Redistricting is the process by which electoral district boundaries are drawn, and a common normative assumption in this process is that districts should be drawn so as to capture coherent communities of interest (COIs). While states rely…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
We develop methods to evaluate whether a political districting accurately represents the will of the people. To explore and showcase our ideas, we concentrate on the congressional districts for the U.S. House of representatives and use the…
In district-based elections, electors cast votes in their respective districts. In each district, the party with maximum votes wins the corresponding seat in the governing body. The election result is based on the number of seats won by…
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…
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…
We explore the fairness of a redistricting game introduced by Mixon and Villar, which provides a two-party protocol for dividing a state into electoral districts, without the participation of an independent authority. We analyze the game in…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…