相关论文: Locating the representational baseline: Republican…

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…

Ballots are the core records of elections. Electronic records of actual ballots cast (cast vote records) are available to the public in some jurisdictions. However, they have been released in a variety of formats and have not been…

Has ideological polarization actually increased in the last decades, or have voters simply sorted themselves into parties matching their ideology more closely? We present a novel methodology to quantify multidimensional ideological…

Using an ensemble of redistricting plans, we evaluate whether a given political districting faithfully represents the geo-political landscape. Redistricting plans are sampled by a Monte Carlo algorithm from a probability distribution that…

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…

The mathematics of redistricting is an area of study that has exploded in recent years. In particular, many different research groups and expert witnesses in court cases have used outlier analysis to argue that a proposed map is a…

Could John Kerry have gained votes in the 2004 Presidential election by more clearly distinguishing himself from George Bush on economic policy? At first thought, the logic of political preferences would suggest not: the Republicans are to…

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…

Recently, scholars from law and political science have introduced metrics which use only election outcomes (and not district geometry) to assess the presence of partisan gerrymandering. The most high-profile example of such a tool is the…

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…

We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…

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…

The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…

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…

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…

Research on growing American political polarization and antipathy primarily studies public institutions and political processes, ignoring private effects including strained family ties. Using anonymized smartphone-location data and…

In legislative redistricting, most states draw their House and Senate maps separately. Ohio and Wisconsin require that their Senate districts be made with a 3:1 nesting rule, i.e., out of triplets of adjacent House districts. We seek to…

Redistricting efforts have gathered contemporary attention in both popular and scholarly debates, particularly in the United States where efforts to redraw congressional districts to favor either of the two major parties in 12 states --…

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…

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…