Related papers: Don't Trust A Single Gerrymandering Metric
We introduce simulated packing and cracking as a technique for evaluating partisan-gerrymandering measures. We apply it to historical congressional and legislative elections to evaluate four measures: partisan bias, declination, efficiency…
Gerrymandering voting districts is one of the most salient concerns of contemporary American society, and the creation of new voting maps, along with their subsequent legal challenges, speaks for much of our modern political discourse. The…
The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…
We study the computational complexity of the map redistricting problem (gerrymandering). Mathematically, the electoral district designer (gerrymanderer) attempts to partition a weighted graph into $k$ connected components (districts) such…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Gerrymandering is a pervasive problem within the US political system. In the past decade, methods based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and statistical outlier tests have been proposed to quantify gerrymandering and were used as…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
Algorithmic and statistical approaches to congressional redistricting are becoming increasingly valuable tools in courts and redistricting commissions for quantifying gerrymandering in the United States. While there is existing literature…
We provide mechanisms and new metric distortion bounds for line-up elections. In such elections, a set of $n$ voters, $m$ candidates, and $\ell$ positions are all located in a metric space. The goal is to choose a set of candidates and…
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…
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…
Deciding whether a political districting plan was distorted by a hidden agenda, or whether it dilutes the voting power of some group, requires a neutral baseline for comparison. Remarkably, all nine U.S. Supreme Court justices have now…
Geographical considerations such as contiguity and compactness are necessary elements of political districting in practice. Yet an analysis of the problem without such constraints yields mathematical insights that can inform real-world…
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…
"Compactness," or the use of shape as a proxy for fairness, has been a long-running theme in the scrutiny of electoral districts; badly-shaped districts are often flagged as examples of the abuse of power known as gerrymandering. The most…
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…
Motivated by putting empirical work based on (synthetic) election data on a more solid mathematical basis, we analyze six distances among elections, including, e.g., the challenging-to-compute but very precise swap distance and the distance…