Browsing by Subject "gerrymandering"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Analyzing the Effects of Partisan Correlation on Election Outcomes Using Order Statistics
    (2019-04-24) Wiebe, Claire
    The legislative representation of political parties in the United States is dependent not only on way that legislative district boundaries are drawn, but also on the way in which people are distributed across a state. That is, there exists a level of partisan correlation within the spacial distribution of an electorate that affects legislative outcomes. This work aims to study the effect of this partisan clustering on election outcomes and related metrics using analytic models and order statistics. Two models of North Carolina, one with a uniformly distributed electorate and one with a symmetrically clustered electorate, are considered both independently and in comparison. These models are used to study expected election outcomes, the proportionality of legislative representation for given state-wide vote fraction, and the sensitivity of vote share to seat share across different correlation length scales. The findings provide interesting insight into the relationship between district proportionality and legislative proportionality, the extent to which the minority party is expected to be underrepresented in seat share for given state-wide vote share and correlation length, and the extent to which the responsiveness of seat share is dependent on state wide vote share and correlation length.
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    Stochastic Study of Gerrymandering
    (2015-05-06) Vaughn, Christy
    In the 2012 election for the US House of Representatives, only four of North Carolina’s thirteen congressional districts elected a democrat, despite a majority democratic vote. This raises the question of whether gerrymandering, the process of drawing districts to favor a political party, was employed. This study explores election outcomes under different choices of district boundaries. We represent North Carolina as a graph of voting tabulation districts. A districting is a division of this graph into thirteen connected subgraphs. We define a probability distribution on districtings that favors more compact districts with close to an equal population in each district. To sample from this distribution, we employ the Metropolis-Hastings variant of Markov Chain Monte Carlo. After sampling, election data from the 2012 US House of Representatives election is used to determine how many representatives would have been elected for each party under the different districtings. Of our randomly drawn districts, we find an average of 6.8 democratic representatives elected. Furthermore, none of the districtings elect as few as four democratic representatives, as was the case in the 2012 election.
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    The Signature of Gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause
    (South Carolina Law Review, 2019) Chin, Andrew; Herschlag, Gregory; Mattingly, Jonathan