Gerrymandering is the manipulation of redistricting to influence the results of a set of elections for local representatives. Gerrymandering has the potential to drastically swing power in legislative bodies even with no change in a population’s political views. Identifying gerrymandering and measuring fairness using metrics of proposed district plans is a topic of current research, but there is less work on how such plans will be perceived by voters. Gathering data on such perceptions presents several challenges such as the ambiguous definitions of ‘fair’ and the complexity of real world geography and district plans. We present a dataset collected from an online crowdsourcing platform on a survey asking respondents to mark which of two maps of equal population distribution but different districts appear more ‘fair’ and the reasoning for their decision. We performed preliminary analysis on this data and identified which of several commonly suggested metrics are most predictive of the responses. We found that the maximum perimeter of any district was the most predictive metric, especially with participants who reported that they made their decision based on the shape of the districts.
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The impact of highly compact algorithmic redistricting on the rural-versus-urban balance
It is commonly believed that, in congressional and state legislature elections in the United States, rural voters have an inherent political advantage over urban voters. We study this hypothesis using an idealized redistricting method, balanced centroidal power diagrams, that achieves essentially perfect population balance while optimizing a principled measure of compactness. We find that, using this method, the degree to which rural or urban voters have a political advantage depends on the number of districts and the population density of urban areas. Moreover, we find that the political advantage in any case tends to be dramatically less than that afforded by district plans used in the real world, including district plans drawn by presumably neutral parties such as the courts. One possible explanation is suggested by the following discovery: modifying centroidal power diagrams to prefer placing boundaries along city boundaries significantly increases the advantage rural voters have over urban voters.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1841954
- PAR ID:
- 10217105
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 397 to 400
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3397536.3422249
