Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) prohibits voting practices that minimize or cancel out minority voting strength. While this section provides no clear framework for avoiding minority vote dilution and creating minority-majority districts, the Supreme Court proposed the Gingles test in the 1986 case Thornberg v Gingles. The Gingles test provides three conditions … Read more
When constructing political districting plans, prominent criteria include population balance, contiguity, and compactness. The compactness of a districting plan, which is often judged by the “eyeball test,” has been quantified in many ways, e.g., Length-Width, Polsby-Popper, and Moment-of-Inertia. This paper considers the number of cut edges, which has recently gained traction in the redistricting literature … Read more
Political districting in the United States is a decennial process of redrawing the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts. The notion of fairness in political districting has been an important topic of subjective debate, with district maps having consequences to multiple stakeholders. Even though districting as an optimization problem has been well-studied, existing models … Read more