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Partisan gerrymandering with geographically compact districts

Part of: Markov processes Stochastic processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2019

Boris Alexeev  and
Dustin G. Mixon
Boris Alexeev*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
Dustin G. Mixon*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
*
* Postal address: Department of Mathematics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
* Postal address: Department of Mathematics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
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Abstract

Bizarrely shaped voting districts are frequently lambasted as likely instances of gerrymandering. In order to systematically identify such instances, researchers have devised several tests for so-called geographic compactness (i.e. shape niceness). We demonstrate that under certain conditions, a party can gerrymander a competitive state into geographically compact districts to win an average of over 70% of the districts. Our results suggest that geometric features alone may fail to adequately combat partisan gerrymandering.

Keywords

GerrymanderingBrownian motion

MSC classification

Primary: 60G50: Sums of independent random variables; random walks
Secondary: 60J65: Brownian motion
Type
Research Papers
Information
Journal of Applied Probability , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 1046 - 1059
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 2018 

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