PALMIERI-THESIS-2018.pdf (1.13 MB)
An Algorithmic Approach to Redraw US Gerrymandered District Boundaries by Minimizing Wasted Votes
thesis
posted on 2018-11-27, 00:00 authored by Laura PalmieriPartisan gerrymandering consists of redrawing the district boundaries to give electoral advantage
to a political party.
In 1986, it was declared unconstitutional and justiciable by the US Supreme Court and, since
then, many efforts have been done to find a standard that could be adopted by the Court to
quantify gerrymandering and eventually reject a redistricting plan. In previous studies, it was
concluded that notions such as quantitative measure of shape compactness and other geometric
indices had many limitations, as redistricting policies take into account other constraints,
and the algorithms that used those indices were highly computationally complex and made the
redistricting process infeasible. Recently, Stephanopoulos and McGhee introduced Efficiency
Gap, a new measure of partisan gerrymandering, which is defined as the ratio of the difference
between the parties’ wasted votes (in a two-party electoral system) to the total number of votes
cast in the election. This metric was found legally convincing by a US Appeals Court in a case
appealed in 2017.
The aim of this project is providing a local search algorithm able to ”un-gerrymander” the
2012 congress district maps for Wisconsin, Virginia, Texas and Pennsylvania by bringing their
efficiency gaps to acceptable levels.
If the US Supreme Court upholds the decision of lower courts, our work can provide a crucial
supporting hand to remove partisan gerrymandering.
History
Advisor
DasGupta, BhaskarChair
DasGupta, BhaskarDepartment
Computer ScienceDegree Grantor
University of Illinois at ChicagoDegree Level
- Masters
Committee Member
Sidiropoulos, Anastasios Baralis, ElenaSubmitted date
August 2018Issue date
2018-06-19Usage metrics
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