Maral Shahmizad

A widespread belief about county splits in political districting plans is wrong

  • Austin Buchanan
  • Soraya Ezazipour
  • Maral Shahmizad
    • Categories Applications - OR and Management Sciences, Combinatorial Optimization, Integer Programming Tags , ,

    Consider the task of dividing a state into k contiguous political districts whose populations must not differ by more than one person, following current practice for congressional districting in the USA. A widely held belief among districting experts is that this task requires at least k-1 county splits. This statement has appeared in expert testimony, … Read more

    Political districting to minimize county splits

  • Maral Shahmizad
  • Austin Buchanan
    • Categories Applications - OR and Management Sciences, Integer Programming, Network Optimization

    When partitioning a state into political districts, a common criterion is that political subdivisions like counties should not be split across multiple districts. This criterion is encoded into most state constitutions and is sometimes enforced quite strictly by the courts. However, map drawers, courts, and the public typically do not know what amount of splitting … Read more