Related papers: Empirical Power Analysis of a Statistical Test 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…
Gerrymandering, the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is a persistent issue in U.S. redistricting cycles. This paper introduces and analyzes a new phenomenon, 'votemandering'- a strategic…
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…
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…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
A recently proposed graph-theoretic metric, the influence gap, has shown to be a reliable predictor of the effect of social influence in two-party elections, albeit only tested on regular and scale-free graphs. Here, we investigate whether…
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…
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…
With historic misses in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections, interest in measuring polling errors has increased. The most common method for measuring directional errors and non-sampling excess variability during a postmortem for an…
Maximum-likelihood exponent maps have been studied as a technique to increase the understanding and improve the fit of power-law exponents to experimental and numerical simulation data, especially when they exhibit both upper and lower…
Multiple matrix sampling is a survey methodology technique that randomly chooses a relatively small subset of items to be presented to survey respondents for the purpose of reducing respondent burden. The data produced are missing…
The outcome of elections is strongly dependent on the districting choices, making thus possible (and frequent) the gerrymandering phenomenon, i.e.\ politicians suitably changing the shape of electoral districts in order to win the…
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…
In causal inference, we can consider a situation in which treatment on one unit affects others, i.e., interference exists. In the presence of interference, we cannot perform a classical randomization test directly because a null hypothesis…
Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan…
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…
Model selection in non-linear models often prioritizes performance metrics over statistical tests, limiting the ability to account for sampling variability. We propose the use of a statistical test to assess the equality of variances in…
After every U.S. national census, a state legislature is required to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts in order to account for changes in population. At the moment this is done in a highly partisan way, with districting done…
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…
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…