Related papers: Taming the Gerrymander--Statistical Physics Approa…
We study the problem of a partisan gerrymanderer who assigns voters to equipopulous districts so as to maximize his party's expected seat share. The designer faces both aggregate uncertainty (how many votes his party will receive) and…
We investigate the connection between Potts (Curie-Weiss) models and stochastic opinion models in the view of the Boltzmann distribution and stochastic Glauber dynamics. We particularly find that the q-voter model can be considered as a…
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…
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…
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…
In many practical scenarios, a population is divided into disjoint groups for better administration, e.g., electorates into political districts, employees into departments, students into school districts, and so on. However, grouping people…
In this survey, we give a friendly introduction from a graph theory perspective to the q-state Potts model, an important statistical mechanics tool for analyzing complex systems in which nearest neighbor interactions determine the aggregate…
This paper studies an integrated system of political and economic systems from a systematic perspective to explore the complex interaction between them, and specially analyzes the case of the US presidential election forecasting. Based on…
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…
Divided Government is nowadays a common feature of the U.S. political system. The voters can cast partisan ballots for two political powers the executive (Presidential elections) and the legislative (the Congress election). Some recent…
The gerrymandering problem is a worldwide problem which sets great threat to democracy and justice in district based elections. Thanks to partisan redistricting commissions, district boundaries are often manipulated to benefit incumbents.…
This paper is to obtain a simple dividing-diagram of the congressional districts, where the only limit is that each district should contain the same population if possibly. In order to solve this problem, we introduce three different…
This paper presents a novel mechanism to endogenously determine the fair division of a state into electoral districts in a two-party setting. No geometric constraints are imposed on voter distributions or district shapes; instead, it is…
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…
The voter model is a paradigm of ordering dynamics. At each time step, a random node is selected and copies the state of one of its neighbors. Traditionally, this state has been considered as a binary variable. Here, we relax this…
The three-dimensional $q$-state Potts model, forced into coexistence by fixing the density of one state, is studied for $q=2$, 3, 4, and 6. As a function of temperature and number of states, we studied the resulting equilibrium droplet…
The recent wave of attention to partisan gerrymandering has come with a push to refine or replace the laws that govern political redistricting around the country. A common element in several states' reform efforts has been the inclusion of…
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…
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…
The $q$-state Potts model is a fundamental model in statistical physics that generalizes the Ising model and plays a key role in the study of phase transitions, critical phenomena, complex systems, and combinatorial optimization. Sampling…