Stochastic Study of Gerrymandering
Abstract
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.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
MathematicsPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9740Citation
Vaughn, Christy (2015). Stochastic Study of Gerrymandering. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9740.Collections
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