As part of its mission, LDF serves as a resource for lawyers, journalists, policymakers, courts, and others interested in the electoral process. To further this end, LDF conducts, funds, and publishes research and in-depth analysis regarding the effectiveness of current and proposed election methods, including the decennial redistricting process. LDF recently filed an amicus curiae brief at the United States Supreme Court in Merrill v. Milligan to advocate for clear standards in the application of the Voting Rights Act in the redistricting process.
LDF is pleased to provide this database of redistricting literature as a resource for those interested in redistricting. LDF does not endorse the perspectives contained therein.
TYPES OF SOURCES
| BK: Published as Book | DS: Dissertation | CT: Court Opinion/Order | ER: Expert Report | FL: Federal Law/Statute |
| FR: Federal Regulation | JA: Journal Article | LB: Legal Brief | LO: Legal Opinion | LR: Law Review Article/Note |
| MO: Monograph | OA: Online Article | PR: Press Release/Blog | SL: State Law/Statute | SR: State Regulation |
GENERAL TOPICS
| APH: Apportionment (U.S. House) | APP: Apportionment Process (General) | CEN: Census (General) |
| PGM: Partisan Gerrymander | RED: Redistricting | RGM: Racial Gerrymander |
| TIM: Timing of Elections | SPB: Straight-Party Ballot | SIM: Simulation Maps |
ABBREVIATIONS
| HC: Hardcover | SC: Softcover/Paperback | MC: Member of Congress |
REDISTRICTING LITERATURE
| YEAR | TYPE | TITLE | AUTHOR(S) | SOURCE; COMMENTS; ABSTRACT; SAMPLE; BLURB; ONLINE LINK |
| 2017 | OA | A Partisan Districting Protocol With Provably Nonpartisan Outcomes | Pegden, Wesley; Procaccia, Ariel D.; Yu, Dingli | arxiv.org [1710.08781] COMMENTS: Proposal for fair districting – party A draws a map of entire state, passes it to Party B who freezes one district. Party B then redraws the map (save the frozen district) and passes map back to Party A. Party A freezes a single district and redraws the state (except frozen districts). This continues until the state is completely districted. ABSTRACT: We design and analyze a protocol for dividing a state into districts, where parties take turns proposing a division, and freezing a district from the other party’s proposed division. We show that our protocol has predictable and provable guarantees for both the number of districts in which each party has a majority of supporters, and the extent to which either party has the power to pack a specific population into a single district. LINK: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781 |
| 2019 | JA | Automated Congressional Redistricting | Levin, Harry A.; Friedler, Sorelle A. | JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL ALGORITHMICS: [3316513] COMMENTS: Divide and conquer redistricting algorithm, which combines partitioning and swapping methods. Only really judges how well an algorithm works based on compactness and minimizing population deviations, so its use may be limited. ABSTRACT: Every 10 years, when states are forced to redraw their congressional districts, the process is intensely partisan, and the outcome is rarely fair and democratic. In the past few decades, the growing capabilities of computers have offered the promise of objective, computerized redistricting. Unfortunately, the redistricting problem can be shown to be NP-Complete, but there are a number of heuristics that are effective. We specifically define the redistricting problem and analyze several variations of a new divide and conquer algorithm, comparing the compactness and population deviation of our new algorithm to existing algorithms and the actual districts. We offer a comparative component-based analysis that demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm component and the type of input. The comparative analysis shows that there are several ways to produce valid redistricting plans, but each approach has benefits and consequences. Our new algorithm produces valid results to the redistricting problem in almost every state that undergoes congressional redistricting, offering a new solution to this challenging real-world problem. In one version, the algorithm produces plans with the optimal population deviation in 42 out of 43 multi-district states, which is better than most algorithms in the literature. While compactness scores vary, this approach offers new opportunities to improve population deviation. Our output files comply with the accepted format at most government hearings and redistricting competitions, so the results would be compatible with most public participation efforts in 2020. LINK: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3316513 |
| 2015 | JA | Representation, neighboring districts, and party loyalty in the U.S. Congress | Kirkland, Justin H.; Williams, R. Lucas | PUBLIC CHOICE [24768908] COMMENTS: Using survey data, this paper shows that MCs take into account their constituents preferences but are also influenced by the preferences of voters in neighboring districts. Implying that incumbents know that these voters could end up in their district when redistricting happens. ABSTRACT: Legislative scholars often assume that legislators are motivated by concerns over re-election. This assumption implies that legislators are forward-looking and are motivated by a concern over what their re-election constituency will look like during their next electoral cycle. In this research, we show how the forward-looking nature of legislators motivates members of the U.S. House of Representatives to represent both their home district and their neighboring districts in their choices regarding when to support their own party. Using survey responses to the 2006, 2008, and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Elections Study to construct measures of Congressional District ideology, empirical analysis is strongly supportive of our claims. Legislators’ choices are strongly influenced both by the ideology of their home district and that of the districts that neighbor their home district. Thus, the electoral connection between citizens and representatives extends beyond a legislator’s own constituents to include the constituents in neighboring districts. LINK: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-016-0307-x |
| 2016 | JA | Cause or Effect? Turnout in Hispanic Majority-Minority Districts | Henderson, John A.; Sekhon, Jasjeet S.; Titiunik, Rocio | POLITICAL ANALYSIS [26349745] COMMENTS: Study wants to see if Hispanics in Maj Hispanic districts vote more. Find that in CA high participating Hispanics are put into MH districts. In TX and FL low participating Hispanics are put into MH districts. So less about the effect of the district on turnout. ABSTRACT: Legislative redistricting alters the political and electoral context for some voters but not others, thus offering a potentially promising research design to study many questions of interest in political science. We apply this design to study the effect that descriptive representation has on co-ethnic political engagement, focusing on Hispanic participation following California’s 2000 redistricting cycle. We show that when “redistrictors” draw legislative boundaries in California’s 1990, 2000, and 2010 apportionment cycles, they systematically sort higher-participating Hispanic voters into majority-Hispanic (MH) jurisdictions represented by co-ethnic candidates, biasing subsequent comparisons of Hispanic participation across districts. Similar sorting occurs during redistricting in Florida and Texas, though here the pattern is reversed, with less-participating Hispanic voters redistricted to MH districts. Our study highlights important heterogeneity in redistricting largely unknown or under-appreciated in previous research. Ignoring this selection problem could significantly bias estimates of the effect of Hispanic representation, either positively or negatively. After we correct for these biases using a hierarchical genetic matching algorithm, we find that, in California, being moved to a district with a Hispanic incumbent has little impact on Hispanic participation in our data. LINK: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/cause-or-effect-turnout-in-hispanic-majorityminority-districts/E2BAFD388469490E2FA0A0F8DB70C473 |
| 2017 | JA | Race, Representation, and the Voting Rights Act | Schuit, Sophie; Rogowski, Jon C. | AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE [26379507] COMMENTS: MCs in states covered by Sec 5 are more supportive of civil rights legislation. Those districts with higher black population and more competition were also more positively predisposed to support civil rights legislation. ABSTRACT: Despite wide scholarly interest in the Voting Rights Act, surprisingly little is known about how its specific provisions affected Black political representation. In this article, we draw on theories of electoral accountability to evaluate the effect of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provision, on the representation of Black interests in the 86th to 105th congresses. We find that MCs who represented jurisdictions subject to the preclearance requirement were substantially more supportive of civil rights-related legislation than legislators who did not represent covered jurisdictions. Moreover, we report that the effects were stronger when Black voters composed larger portions of the electorate and in more competitive districts. This result is robust to a wide range of model specifications and empirical strategies, and it persists over the entire time period under study. Our findings have especially important implications given the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Shelby County v. Holder. LINK: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379507 |
| 2017 | JA | From the Constituent’s Eye: Experimental Evidence on the District Selection Preferences of Individuals | Winburn, Jonathan; Henderson, Michael; Dowling, Conor M. | POLITICAL RESEARCH QUARTERLY [26384898] COMMENTS: Surveys with hypotheticals asking whether respondents would prefer to live in district with more co-partisans but split county, or the reverse. R’s preferred split counties with more co-partisans. ABSTRACT: States have increasingly taken the process of redistricting out of the hands of elected legislators and placed it with the public. The shift is in part driven by a concern that legislators are motivated to partition districts to advantage their own and their political party’s electoral prospects, whereas citizens are not. We know little, however, about the preferences of the public when it comes to redistricting. One party-based argument is that individuals should prefer to share a district with as many like-minded partisans as possible to maximize their legislative representation, whereas other arguments suggest that nonpartisan factors, such as sharing a district with their community, may be more important. Using a novel experimental design, we find that for most participants, the draw to share a district with co-partisans is stronger than a preference for preserving a community (county) within the district even when participants are specifically instructed to attend to local jurisdictional boundaries. LINK: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1065912916671829 |
| 2018 | JA | The Wielding Influence of Political Networks: Representation in Majority-Latino Districts | Ocampo, Angela X | POLITICAL RESEARCH QUARTERLY [26600459] COMMENTS: Explains why some majority Latino districts do not elect Hispanics. Answer lies in networks of parties and interest groups – in those districts with stronger ties, Hispanics almost always run and win. ABSTRACT: Latino-majority congressional districts are far more likely to elect Latino representatives to Congress than majority white districts. However, not all majority-Latino districts do so. This paper addresses this question, and it investigates how the level of influence of political parties and interest groups in majority-Latino districts substantially shapes Latino representation to the US House of Representatives. I rely on five case studies and a dataset of candidates to open congressional races with a Latino population plurality from 2004 to 2014. The evidence indicates that groups and political networks are critical for Latina/o candidate recruitment, the organization of resources in a congressional district, the deployment of campaign resources on behalf of certain candidates, and the eventual success of Latina/o candidates. The findings suggest that Latino descriptive and substantive representation are shaped by the wielding influence of political parties and interest groups LINK: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3fq4b8q2 |
| 2018 | JA | Revisiting Majority-Minority Districts and Black Representation | Hicks, William D.; Klarner, Carl E.; Smith, Daniel A. | POLITICAL RESEARCH QUARTERLY [26600481] COMMENTS: States in the deep south require the highest percentage of blacks in order to perform. But also, most majority-minority districts could shed minority population and still elect minority representative. ABSTRACT: What is the minimum black population necessary to elect African-American state lawmakers? We offer the most comprehensive examination of the election of black state legislators in the post-Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) era. We begin by charting changes in the partisan affiliation of state legislators and the percentage of black legislators from 1971 to 2016. This descriptive assessment is undertaken according to important regional (Non-South and South) subregional (Rim South and Deep South) contexts in American politics. We then perform multivariate analyses of likelihood of electing black legislators across three periods following the marked increase in the creation of majority-minority districts (1993-1995, 2003-2005, 2013-2015). Because of sectional variation in the partisan strength of major parties, the probability of achieving black representation is significantly different depending upon whether contest occurs in the Non-South, Rim South, or Deep South, with the latter constituting of the highest threshold black population necessary to elect an African-American. By merging an original dataset on state legislative elections with the most complete evaluation of the factors shaping the election of black lawmakers, our findings shed new on minority representation and how sectional differences greatly affect the electoral success of African-Americans. LINK: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1065912917738574 |
| 2018 | JA | The Implications of Apportionment on Quality Candidate Emergence and Electoral Competition | Geras, Matthew J. | POLITICAL RESEARCH QUARTERLY [26600485] COMMENTS: States with fewer districts (and those not gaining seats) have higher quality candidates on average than big states and states gaining seats. ABSTRACT: The U.S. apportions congressional districts both across states and within states based upon population. Scholars long focused on the electoral implications of redistricting within states, but there has been less consideration of the electoral implications of apportionment across states. In this paper, I analyze congressional elections from 2002-2014 and theorize that the limited number of political opportunities in states with few congressional districts to higher levels of quality candidate emergence and electoral competition in these states. I find support for this specifically, as the number of political opportunities in a state increases, the number of quality candidates running for office decreases. LINK: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1065912917744896?journalCode=prqb |
| 2015 | JA | Keeping Up with the Congressmen: Evaluating Constituents’ Awareness of Redistricting | Lawrence, Christopher N.; Huffman, Scott H. | SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY [26612207] COMMENTS: Argument for keeping cores of districts. Breaking voter-representative link affects knowledge and perhaps representation. ABSTRACT: Objective. We seek to understand how voters respond to being drawn into a new congressional district: specifically, the new Seventh District of South Carolina created in 2012. Methods. We employ data from a survey of voters in the new district, and employ descriptive statistics and logistic regression models to identify whether voters are aware of the new district, whether they expect better representation as a result, and to explain their likely vote choice. Results. We find limited awareness of the new district among voters, despite a competitive election campaign, but nonetheless a broad public understanding that redistricting may lead to more local influence in Congress. Conclusions. Our results suggest that redistricting efforts that ensure the maintenance of communities of interest to preserve voter-representative links, even if that means deviation from a strict “one person, one vote” standard, may be superior from a representational standpoint. LINK: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ssqu.12130 |
| 2017 | JA | The Pseudoparadox of Partisan Mapmaking and Congressional Competition | Goedert, Nicholas | STATE POLITICS & POLICY QUARTERLY [26654465] COMMENTS: Partisan gerrymanders, compared to bipartisan gerrymanders, induce more competition. In part because of unanticipated changes in voting over the course of a decade. Commissions also draw more competitive districts. ABSTRACT: Why are fewer congressional elections competitive at the district level when the national electoral environment is at its most competitive? This article explores this “pseudo paradox”, and argues that the answer can be found in partisan redistricting. Through an analysis of 40 years of congressional elections, I find that partisan gerrymanders induce greater competitiveness as national tides increase, largely due to unanticipated consequences of waves adverse to the map-drawing party, particularly in seats held by that party. The phenomenon anecdotally coined by Grofman and Brunell as the “dummymander” is thus actually quite common and has significant effects on rates of congressional competition nationally. In contrast, bipartisan maps are shown to induce lower competition, while nonpartisan maps induce higher competition, under all electoral conditions and competitiveness measures. But the effects of partisan gerrymanders on competition, though strong, can only be seen in interaction with short term national forces. LINK: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26654465 |
| 2020 | The Essential Role of Empirical Validation in Legislative Redistricting Simulation | Fifield, Benjamin; Imai, Kosuke; Kawahara, Jun; Kenny, Christopher T. | (BLANK) [2330443X.2020] COMMENTS: Critique of some simulation methods in so far as people claim the algorithm draws all possible maps, but without confirmation. They propose a method to empirically validate that a method generates a representative sample of all possible maps. ABSTRACT: As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation methods are designed to yield a representative sample of all redistricting plans that satisfy statutory guidelines and requirements such as contiguity, population parity, and compactness. A proposed redistricting plan can be considered gerrymandered if it constitutes an outlier relative to this sample according to partisan fairness metrics. Despite their growing use, an insufficient effort has been made to empirically validate the accuracy of the simulation methods. We apply a recently developed computational method that can efficiently enumerate all possible redistricting plans and yield an independent sample from this population. We show that this algorithm scales to a state with a couple of hundred geographical units. Finally, we empirically examine how existing simulation methods perform on realistic validation datasets. LINK: https://imai.fas.harvard.edu/research/enumerate.html |
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| 2018 | JA | A New Approach for Developing Neutral Redistricting Plans | Magleby, Daniel B.; Mosesson, Daniel B. | POLITICAL ANALYSIS [a-new-approach] COMMENTS: Partitioning approach to automated redistricting. ABSTRACT: Computers hold the potential to draw legislative districts in a neutral way. Existing approaches to automated redistricting may introduce bias and encounter difficulties when drawing districts of large and even medium-sized jurisdictions. We present a new algorithm that can neutrally generate legislative districts without indications of bias that are contiguous, balanced and relatively compact. The algorithm does not show the kinds of bias found in prior algorithms and is an advance over previously published algorithms for redistricting because it is computationally more efficient. We use the new algorithm to draw 10,000 maps of congressional districts in Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas. We find that it is unlikely that the number of majority-minority districts we observe in the Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas congressional maps of these states would happen through a neutral redistricting process. LINK: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/new-approach-for-developing-neutral-redistricting-plans/31F8EB3FFB7A8F5B3F7C2171BE016D47 |
| 2018 | JA | Congressional Redistricting: Keeping Communities Together? | Rossiter, Kayln M.; Wong, David W. S.; Delamater, Paul L. | THE PROFESSIONAL GEOGRAPHER [no_file] COMMENTS: Interesting approach to defining communities of interest. Two ways: one by grouping people by socio-economic similarities, the other by cultural places – use census-designated places with Thiessen polygons. ABSTRACT: The process of congressional redistricting, delineating boundaries for districts in which voters elect members to the U.S. House of Representatives, has always been an expensive and controversial process. Congressional districts (CDs) are redrawn due to changes in population reflected by the decennial census to ensure equal representation. Laws and regulations literature identifies eight criteria that may be considered when determining the boundaries of CDs and this article focuses on one of those criteria, maintaining communities of interest (COIs). This criterion requires states to preserve these boundaries when delineating CDs but fails to define a COI. This research proposes and evaluates two approaches to define a COI and examines the extent to which this criterion has been adhered to. One definition uses Thiessen polygons and census-designated places to delineate COIs based on known cultural places, whereas the other definition uses cluster analysis to group together people with similar sociodemographic characteristics. The results show that the two definitions are feasible for defining a COI. Furthermore, the states largely maintain the COI boundaries within their CDs by only splitting, at most, 17.1 percent of the COIs defined. Existing literature shows that maintaining COIs within CDs leads to higher voter participation and engagement, as well as better representation. The results show that if either definition was adopted, states could comply with this criterion with relative ease. Furthermore, a standard definition could help reduce the cost and controversy surrounding the redistricting process. Key Words: census, clustering, communities of interest, redistricting, Thiessen polygons. LINK: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00330124.2018.1443477?journalCode=rtpg20 |
| 2020 | Artificial Partisan Advantage in Redistricting | Eguia, Jon X. | UNPUBLISHED [eguia metric] COMMENTS: New partisan gerrymander metric, that compares seats won to the proportion of the population that lives in counties won by that party. The smaller the districts of interest, say legislative seats, then the method can use towns and cities rather than counties. You look for a geographic entity that is smaller than the districts of interest. ABSTRACT: I propose a measure of artificial partisan advantage in redistricting. Redistricting is the process of drawing electoral district maps. Electoral outcomes depend on the maps drawn. The measure I propose compares the share of seats won by a party to the share of the population that lives in jurisdictions (counties and towns) won by this party. If a party has a larger share of seats than the share of the population in jurisdictions in which the party won most votes, then the drawing of the electoral maps conferred an artificial advantage to this party. This measure takes into account the geographic sorting of partisan voters and is simple to compute. Using U.S. election data from 2012 to 2018, I find an artificial partisan advantage of seventeen House seats to the Republican party. I argue that the artificial partisan advantage in the congressional maps of North Carolina, Utah, Michigan and Ohio is excessive. LINK: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3335967 |
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| 2013 | JA | Evidence in Voting Rights Act Litigation: Producing Accurate Estimates of Racial Voting Patterns | de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2013.0224] COMMENTS: Ecological Inference best method for doing racial bloc voting analysis when there are two groups (white and black). With three or more he proposes a new more complicated method. ABSTRACT: Voting Rights Act litigation, even in the wake of Shelby County v. Holder, requires estimates of racial bloc voting, or the extent to which members of different racial groups vote differently. Although there are a variety of methods to make these estimates, direct evaluation and comparison of these methods is lacking. I examine these alternate methods in the way that they might be used in litigation using a large dataset of partisanship and racial information at the precinct level in five states. Additionally, I extend the application of these methods to estimation of racial group preferences in locations with more than one racial minority and assess the contextual determinants of larger and smaller errors in ecological regression estimates. I conclude that the ecological inference method developed by King (1997), which incorporates the deterministic precinct-level bounds on the quantities of interest and is easily implemented using open-source software, provides the best estimates for precinct-specific racial polarization using a binary racial split. When accounting for more than two racial groups, however, a similar but modified Multinomial-Dirichlet Bayesian model performs marginally better. LINK: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2013.0224 |
| 2015 | JA | Measures of Partisan Bias for Legislating Fair Elections | Nagle, John F. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2015.0331] COMMENTS: Different metrics for bias. Recommends that partisan fairness be included in redistricting standards. ABSTRACT: Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single-member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are equalization of losing votes and equalization of wasted votes, both of which apply directly when the statewide vote is not 50% and which require, not just partisan symmetry, but specific forms of the seats-votes curve. A new measure of bias is introduced, based on the geometric area between the seats-vote curve and the symmetrically inverted seats-votes curve. These measures are applied to recent Pennsylvania congressional elections and to abstract models of the seats-votes curves. The numerical values obtained from the various measures of bias are compared and contrasted. Each bias measure has merits for different seats-votes curves and for different elections, but all essentially agree for most cases when applied to measure only partisan bias, not conflated with competitiveness. This supports the inclusion of partisan fairness as a fundamental element for election law reform, and some options are discussed. LINK: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2015.0311 |
| 2016 | JA | A Practical Procedure for Detecting a Partisan Gerrymander | Arrington, Theodore S. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2016.0383] COMMENTS: Adjusted normal vote – statewide elections averaged and then set to 50 percent. Then do hypothetic swing. ABSTRACT: The United States Supreme Court may be open to reconsidering the standards for judging the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders. This article presents workable criteria for determining when districting arrangements so distort the process of translating votes into seats in a legislature that the process or the redistricting plan rises to a constitutional violation. The procedure uses an adjusted normal partisan vote (ANPV) measure to determine the number of seats that the preferred party would receive when the vote is equally divided between the parties and how that distribution of seats would change as the ANPV is adjusted up or down. This procedure would show that a gerrymander is long-lasting, severe, and intentional. LINK: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2016.0383 |
| 2016 | JA | Toward a Talismanic Redistricting Tool:A Computational Method for Identifying Extreme Redistricting Plans | Cho, Wendy K. Tam; Liu, Yan Y. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2016.0384] COMMENTS: One of the first articles proposing the computational drawing of many non-partisan maps to compare to the enacted map. ABSTRACT: Partisan gerrymandering is widely frowned upon by the citizenry as well as the Supreme Court. Despite broad disdain for the practice, the Supreme Court has found it difficult to identify a workable standard by which we might regulate political gerrymandering. We have lacked sufficient tools to analyze and synthesize redistricting data, in part, because the requisite computation is massive. At the same time, the recent proliferation of significant computing power has led to the discovery of the extensive and often surprising reach of technology, information, and computation in many realms of life. Our capacities to compile, organize, analyze, and disseminate information have increased dramatically and facilitated the creation of many tools to connect citizens and automate human tasks. We present a computational model that brings these significantly advanced computing capacities to the redistricting process. Our model allows us to understand redistricting in fundamentally new ways and allows us to integrate technological advances with our articulated theories for redistricting and democratic rule while also empowering citizens with new abilities to understand and overturn partisan gerrymanders. LINK: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2016.0384 |
| 2016 | JA | How Competitive Should a Fair Single Member Districting Plan Be? | Nagle, John F. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2016.0386] COMMENTS: Symmetry and responsiveness should be considered when evaluating harm done by partisan gerrymanders. Proportionality is implied by Shapiro v. McManus decision. ABSTRACT: Partisan unfairness is easily detected when the statewide vote is equally divided between two parties. But when the vote is not evenly divided, even the determination of which party is disfavored becomes controversial. This article examines the ideal fair outcome in a two-party single-member district system when the statewide vote is not equally divided. It is shown that equal voter empowerment, implied by readings of the First Amendment (Shapiro v. McManus and Whitford v. Nichol), requires that the fraction of seats be proportional to the fraction of the statewide vote. However, strict proportionality conflicts with the single-member district system, so alternative approaches are explored. Generalized party inefficiency and voter effectiveness are defined and shown to encompass many possibilities for an ideal fair seats-votes function. The best choice is fundamentally determined by the degree of geographical heterogeneity of voters of like mind. Based upon historical election results, it appears that a good approximation to a normative seats-votes function of the American system of single-member districts should have competitiveness (aka responsiveness) roughly twice as large as proportionality. This is consistent with the method employed by the plaintiffs in Whitford v. Nichol. This method is also basically consistent with the claim of the plaintiffs in Shapiro v. McManus, although in this case gerrymandering is better exposed by examining symmetry. LINK: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2016.0386 |
| 2016 | JA | Three Practical Tests for Gerrymandering: Application to Maryland and Wisconsin | Wang, Samuel S.-H. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2016.0387] COMMENTS: Uses comparison of means, mean-median, and whether the plan moves the state towards or away from proportionality. ABSTRACT: Partisan gerrymandering arises when many single-district gerrymanders are combined to obtain an overall advantage. The Supreme Court has held that partisan gerrymandering is recognizable by its asymmetry: for a given distribution of popular votes, if the parties switch places in popular vote, the numbers of seats would change in an unequal fashion. However, the asymmetry standard is only a broad statement of principle, and no analytical method for assessing asymmetry has yet been held to be manageable. Recently I proposed (68 Stanford Law Review 1263) three statistical tests to reliably assess asymmetry in state-level districting schemes: (a) a discrepancy in winning vote margins between the two parties’ seats; (b) undue reliable wins for the party in charge of redistricting, as measured by the mean-median difference in vote share, or by an unusually even distribution of votes across districts; and (c) unrepresentative distortion in the number of seats won based on expectations from nationwide district characteristics. These tests use district-level election outcomes, do not require the drawing of maps, and are accessible via nearly any desktop computer. Each test probes a facet of partisan asymmetry. The first two tests analyze intent using well-established, century-old statistical tests. Once intents are established, the effects of gerrymandering can be analyzed using the third test, which is calculated rapidly by computer simulation. The three tests show that two current cases, the Wisconsin State Assembly (Whitford v. Nichol) and the Maryland congressional delegation (Shapiro v. McManus), meet criteria for a partisan gerrymander. I propose that an intents-and-effects standard based on one or more of these tests is robust enough to mitigate the need to demonstrate predominant partisan intent. The three statistical standards offered here add to the judge’s toolkit for rapidly and rigorously identifying the consequences of partisan redistricting. LINK: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2016.0387 |
| 2016 | JA | Considering the Prospects for Establishing a Packing Gerrymandering Standard | Best, Robin E.; Donahue, Shawn J.; Krasno, Jonathan; Magleby, Daniel B.; McDonald, Michael D. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2016.0392] COMMENTS: Compares five methods of measuring gerrymandering: efficiency gap, symmetry, Wang’s three prongs, computer map drawing, and equal vote weight test. Prefers the last one and criticizes the other four. Good for critiques of those methods. ABSTRACT: Courts have found it difficult to evaluate whether redistricting authorities have engaged in constitutionally impermissible partisan gerrymandering. The knotty problem is that no proposed standard has found acceptance as a convincing means for identifying whether a districting plan is a partisan gerrymander with knowable unconstitutional effects. We review five proposed standards for curbing gerrymandering. We take as our perspective how easily manageable and effective each would be to apply at the time a redistricting authority decides where to draw the lines or, post hoc, when a court is asked to decide whether an unconstitutional gerrymander has been enacted. We conclude that, among the five proposals, an equal vote weight standard offers the best prospects for identifying the form of unconstitutional gerrymanders that all but ensure one party is relegated to perpetual minority status. [See RED.029.] LINK: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2016.0392 |
| 2016 | JA | Public Hearings and Congressional Redistricting: Evidence from the Western United States 2011-2012 | Miller, Peter; Grofman, Bernard | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2016.0425] COMMENTS: Looks at selection of public comments at redistricting hearings, finds some suggestions are doable, and small suggestions are most likely to be implemented. Generally positive about ability of public to affect maps. ABSTRACT: We test theories about the effects of public input into redistricting, with evidence taken from remarks made in person at public hearings. One model, the cynical model, features legislators acting in their own interest and carries an expectation that public input is more or less a sham that line drawers will ignore, holding hearings only to give the appearance of responsiveness. A variant of this cynical model suggests that political parties and candidates will seek to manipulate the public input process by making partisan suggestions disguised as citizen input. An idealist vision, on the other hand, suggests input by the public can provide important information to line drawers about citizen preferences which can and will get integrated into plans. A further complication is who is drawing the lines. We might expect that redistricting commissions would be more responsive to public input than that of legislators, since the former has less of a partisan motivation. We analyze a sample of 937 suggestions proffered in person by individuals, public officials, and group representatives at 22 public comment hearings in nine states. We find the public does contribute a large number of “feasibly mappable” suggestions that are incorporated into plans, but only suggestions addressing a small geographical area are likely to be adopted. Finally, we find little difference in the degree to which different types of redistricting authorities incorporate suggestions made at hearings into their plans. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2016.0425 |
| 2017 | JA | Quantifying Gerrymandering Using the Vote Distribution | Warrington, Gregory S. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2017.0447] COMMENTS: Declination is a measure of asymmetry in the vote distribution that relies only on the fraction of seats each party wins in conjunction with the aggregate vote each party uses to win those seats. The declination is essentially an angle associated to the vote distribution. ABSTRACT: One way to assess the presence of gerrymandering is to analyze the distribution of votes. The efficiency gap, which does this, plays a central role in a 2016 federal court case on the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s state legislative district plan. Unfortunately, however, the efficiency gap reduces to proportional representation, an expectation that is not a constitutional right. We present a new measure of partisan asymmetry that does not rely on the shapes of districts, is simple to compute, is provably related to the “packing and cracking” integral to gerrymandering, and that avoids the constitutionality issue presented by the efficiency gap. In addition, we introduce a generalization of the efficiency gap that also avoids the equivalency to proportional representation. We apply the first function to U.S. congressional and state legislative plans from recent decades to identify candidate gerrymanders. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2017.0447 |
| 2017 | JA | Partisan Gerrymandering and the Political Process: Effects on Roll-Call Voting and State Policies | Caughey, Devin; Tausanovitch, Chris; Warshaw, Christopher | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2017.0452] COMMENTS: Gerrymandering affects substantive representation, especially if it involves flipping the majority party. Efficiency gaps favoring one party or the other do move the ideological location of state legislature. ABSTRACT: Recent scholarship has documented the advantages of a new measure of partisan gerrymandering: the difference in the parties’ wasted votes, divided by the total number of votes cast. This measure, known as the efficiency gap (EG), can be calculated directly from aggregate vote totals, facilitating comparison of the severity of party gerrymandering across states and time. In this article, we conduct the first analysis of the EG’s effects on legislative representation and policymaking in the states. We first show that the partisan outcome of legislative elections has important causal effects on the ideological representation of individual districts, the ideological composition of legislative chambers, and the conservatism of state policymaking. We then show that variation in the EG across state-years is associated with systematic differences in the ideological location of the median state legislator and in the conservatism of state policies. These results suggest that partisan gerrymandering has major consequences not only for who wins elections but for the political process as a whole. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2017.0452 |
| 2017 | JA | Measuring Efficiency in Redistricting | McGhee, Eric | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2017.0453] COMMENTS: Efficiency gap is good metric. ABSTRACT: There has been a recent surge in work on measuring partisan bias in single-member (SMD) redistricting plans. A classic SMD gerrymander is “efficient”: it “cracks” a party’s supporters so they barely lose many seats and “packs” the remainder in a few seats that the party wins by large margins. This essay classifies these new metrics and proposes a simple principle for evaluating each metric as a gauge of this efficiency. It finds that only methods that measure the packing and cracking directly through the counting of wasted votes can serve as consistent measures of the concept. Indeed, measures of symmetry in the seats-votes curve not only fail to consistently measure efficiency but suffer from internal contradictions in certain circumstances. Further examination of the wasted votes measures reveals that only a modified version of the “efficiency gap”, a measure active in ongoing litigation, can serve as a measure of efficiency under a wide range of electoral circumstances. Among the rest, there is considerable variation in their ability to serve as appropriate measures of the concept. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2017.0453 |
| 2017 | JA | The Impact of Political Geography on Wisconsin Redistricting: An Analysis of Wisconsin’s Act 43 Assembly Districting Plan | Chen, Jowei | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2017.0455] COMMENTS: This may be Chen’s first article about using computer algorithm to draw thousands of maps to compare to an enacted or proposed map. ABSTRACT: This article illustrates how the relationship between political geography and the electoral bias of a districting plan, as measured by the efficiency gap, can be analyzed in a statistically rigorous manner using computer simulations of the legislative redistricting process. By generating a large number of different districting plans designed to optimize on traditional redistricting criteria, the computer simulation process demonstrates the range of districting plans that would likely emerge from a neutral, non-gerrymandered process. Courts and litigants can then draw inferences by comparing the efficiency gap of an enacted districting plan against this range of simulated plans. I use this method to illustrate how Wisconsin’s Act 43 created an Assembly districting plan with an extreme, Republican-favoring efficiency gap that would not have been possible under a map-drawing process that prioritizes traditional redistricting criteria. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2017.0455 |
| 2017 | JA | Crafting a Judicially Manageable Standard for Partisan Gerrymandering: Five Necessary Elements | Grofman, Bernard | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2017.0459] COMMENTS: This article is a narrative written for the Supreme Court before the Rucho decision. It’s Grofman take on a judicially manageable standard. ABSTRACT: Beginning with a definition of gerrymandering, and after a brief review of the evolution of the case law on partisan gerrymandering, I propose five necessary elements of a test for when partisan gerrymandering rises to the level of unconstitutionality: (a) a clear and severe injury involving a disparate impact on a political party that serves as the vehicle for the expression of particular ideas and values; (b) effects that can be expected to be durable; (c) effects that can be shown not to be explicable either by features of the partisan electoral geography that impact all plans, or by chance; (d) evidence that there exist one or more remedial plans that address the constitutional violation while also satisfying, on balance, all relevant constitutional and statutory criteria at least as well as the challenged plan; and (e) compelling direct or indirect evidence of invidious partisan intent. I link these five elements to recent Supreme Court and district court opinions about an appropriate standard for partisan gerrymandering. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/elj.2017.0459 |
| 2017 | JA | Rejoinder to “Considering the Prospects for Establishing a Packing Gerrymandering Standard” | McGhee, Eric | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2017.0461] COMMENTS: This is a response to Best and McDonald in which they criticize the efficiency gap. McGhee responds. It is mainly an academic discussion of how to best judge what a partisan gerrymander is and how best to measure it. ABSTRACT: In this issue, Robin E. Best and coauthors evaluate a series of measures of gerrymandering and conclude that some should be preferred over others. In this rejoinder, I suggest that their conclusions are premature because they do not offer a clear idea of what unfairness in redistricting means nor a sophisticated discussion of the mechanics of each measure. As such, their evaluations are inconsistent and sometimes factually inaccurate. Their analysis probably obscures more than it clarifies. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2017.0461 |
| 2017 | JA | American Disproportionality: A Historical Analysis of Partisan Bias in Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives | Tamas, Bernard | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2017.0464] COMMENTS: This article outlines a simple method that purports to measure proportionality and partisan bias with a single metric. ABSTRACT: In this article, I introduce a new index for measuring partisan bias called the Directional Proportionality Index (DPIx) and apply it to elections to the House of Representatives since 1900. Derived from the Loosemore-Hanby index, the novelty of DPIx lies in the fact that it synthesizes a proportionality index with a measure of partisan symmetry. I then apply this index to House elections from 1900 to 2016 at the national level as well as in several states, and I also tested it against hypothetical circumstances in which the negative effects of gerrymandering are completely eliminated. The results demonstrate that while gerrymandering is currently producing a pro-Republican bias, this asymmetrical disproportionality has regularly existed in House elections over the past century and was often much more severe. The evidence suggests that short of substantial electoral reform, asymmetrical disproportionality is likely to remain a fundamental characteristic of American electoral politics. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2017.0464 |
| 2017 | JA | Appearances Do Matter: Congressional District Compactness and Electoral Turnout | Ladewig, Jeffrey W. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2017.0466] COMMENTS: Shows that turnout is higher in more compact districts. ABSTRACT: Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously declared in Shaw v. Reno that “appearances do matter” when it comes to the shape of congressional districts. Although there are no definitive legal requirements for districts, geographical appearances, the argument is widely posited that more compact districts are better. The reasoning often asserts, and empirical studies have shown, that compactness improves communication between representatives and constituents, increases political information flows, produces fairer results, as well as restricts excessive gerrymandering. These, in turn, can all increase political participation and improve the legitimacy of our representative institutions. Despite this conventional wisdom, there is little empirical evidence on the electoral effects of compactness. Using a dataset on the compactness of U.S. House districts, with multiple measures generated by geographic information system (GIS) analyses over two redistricting cycles, I estimate the effects of congressional district compactness on electoral turnout and argue that Sandra Day O’Connor is correct: “appearances do matter”. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2017.0466 |
| 2017 | JA | Authors’ Response- Values and Validations: Proper Criteria for Comparing Standards for Packing Gerrymanders | Best, Robin E.; Donahue, Shawn J.; Krasno, Jonathan; Magleby, Daniel B.; McDonald, Michael D. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2017.0471] COMMENTS: Response to McGhee’s article about best ways to evaluate gerrymandering metrics. [See RED.022 & RED.029.] ABSTRACT: We explain why Eric McGhee’s criticisms of our effort to establish a standard for detecting packing gerrymanders sometimes misapprehends and other times misunderstands the proper evaluation criteria. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2017.0471 |
| 2018 | JA | Efficiency Gap, Voter Turnout, and the Efficiency Principle | Veomett, Ellen | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2018.0488] COMMENTS: This is a very technical piece that is a criticism of the EG. ABSTRACT: Recently, scholars from law and political science have introduced metrics which use only election outcomes (and not district geometry) to assess the presence of partisan gerrymandering. The most high-profile example of such a tool is the efficiency gap (EG). Some scholars have suggested that such tools should be sensitive enough to alert us when two election outcomes have the same percentage of votes going to political party A, but one of the two outcomes awards party A more seats. When a metric is able to distinguish election outcomes in this way, that metric is said to satisfy the efficiency principle. In this article, we show that the efficiency gap fails to satisfy the efficiency principle. We show precisely how the efficiency principle breaks down in the presence of unequal voter turnout. To do this, we first present a construction that, given any rationals 1/4 < V < 3/4 and 0 < S < 1, constructs an election outcome with vote share V, seat share S, and EG= 0. (For instance, one party can get 26% of the vote and anywhere from 1% to 99% of the seats while the efficiency gap remains zero.) Then, for any election with vote share 1/4 < V < 3/4, seat share S, and EG= 0, we express the ratio q of average turnout in districts party A lost to average turnout in districts party A won as a function in only V and S. It is well known that when all districts have equal turnout, EG can be expressed as a simple formula in V and S; we express the efficiency gap of any election as an equation only in V, S, and q. We also report on the values of q that can be observed in actual elections. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2018.0488 |
| 2018 | JA | Can State Courts Cure Partisan Gerrymandering: Lessons from League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (2018) | Grofman, Bernard; Cervas, Jonathan R. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2018.0496] COMMENTS: In-depth look at Pennsylvania state court’s gerrymandering decision. ABSTRACT: In League of Women Voters et al. v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania et al. (2018), henceforth abbreviated LWV, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down that state’s congressional plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. It did so entirely on state law grounds after a three-judge federal court had rejected issuing a preliminary injunction against the plan. The aim of this essay is to examine the implications of LWV for future partisan gerrymandering litigation. In particular, we look toward the applicability of the Pennsylvania court’s approach to other potential partisan gerrymandering challenges brought under state law, especially those in the 12 states whose state constitutions have provisions essentially identical to the one relied upon by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and in states with similar provisions. We pay particular attention to how the court made use of the expert witness testimony in the case, relying on some of it, while rejecting or critiquing the applicability of other elements, since such a discussion can inform future litigation in state courts drawing on the LWV opinion for ideas. In our concluding discussion we contrast the criteria used to evaluate partisan gerrymandering by this court with those used by federal courts, and we look at how it may impact the decisions of legislators about line drawing in 2020. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2018.0496 |
| 2018 | JA | Examining the Effects of Partisan Redistricting on Candidate Entry Decisions | Williamson, Ryan D. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2018.0505] COMMENTS: Looks at who does the redistricting (partisan, commission, court) and finds links to likelihood for emergence of quality candidates. Finds the more partisan the map, the fewer quality candidates run for office. Concludes courts and commissions are better for drawing maps. ABSTRACT: Redistricting has been a highly contentious topic in American politics for many decades. The many instances of politicians exploiting the redistricting process to achieve a partisan goal have been widely chronicled. Nonpartisan redistricting plans serve to keep politicians from taking advantage of the process for their own advantage, and they therefore ostensibly serve to increase competition, which in turn improves representation. However, the effect of nonpartisan plans on elections is not entirely clear. I seek to adjudicate competing conclusions about the effect of nonpartisan plans by evaluating the effect of different redistricting methods on quality candidate emergence. I find that, relative to commissions, partisan plans produce fewer quality candidates, more uncontested elections, and fewer open seats. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2018.0505 |
| 2018 | JA | A Comparison of Partisan-Gerrymandering Measures | Warrington, Gregory S. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2018.0508] COMMENTS: This is a relatively technical piece but provides good basis for criticisms of bias, efficiency gap, declination, etc. Compares how well each metric does under various hypothetical and real elections. ABSTRACT: We compare and contrast 14 measures that have been proposed for the purpose of quantifying partisan gerrymandering. We consider measures that, rather than examining the shapes of districts, utilize only the partisan vote distribution among districts. The measures considered are two versions of partisan bias, the efficiency gap and several of its variants, the mean-median difference and the equal vote weight standard, the declination and one variant, and the lopsided-means test. Our primary means of evaluating these measures is a suite of hypothetical elections we classify from the start as fair or unfair. We conclude that the declination is the most successful measure in terms of avoiding false positives and false negatives on the elections considered. We include in a supplementary appendix the most extreme outliers for each measure among historical congressional and state legislative elections. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2018.0508 |
| 2018 | JA | An Antidote for Gobbledygook: Organizing the Judge’s Partisan Gerrymandering Toolkit into Tests of Opportunity and Outcome | Wang, Samuel S.-H.; Remlinger, Brian A.; Williams, Ben | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2018.0526] COMMENTS: Another article that categorizes different partisan gerrymandering metrics. ABSTRACT: Despite recent setbacks, litigation-based challenges to extreme partisan gerrymandering continue, and quantitative methods for detection are more important than ever. Many measurement tools have emerged that probe the question of whether a redistricting map is extreme or violates the principle of partisan symmetry. Such tools were used successfully in a lawsuit concerning Pennsylvania congressional districts under that state’s constitution. Here we provide a framework for categorizing these tests for future use in state and federal constitutional cases. Our framework explains how measures should be interpreted and identifies which tests will be most effective given the specific facts of a particular state. Broadly, the tests can be divided into two categories: those that identify inequality of opportunity, i.e., a systematic effort to deprive of a group’s ability to elect representatives; and those that identify inequality of outcome, i.e., a durable distortion in the amount of representation. In each case, the measures examine the difference between the existing map and what would occur under a districting process in which partisan interests are not the overriding consideration. A general thread is that of “significance testing””, in which a district or statewide districting scheme can be defined as more extreme than the great majority of possibilities that could arise through unbiased means. Such tests are most often done with well-established classical statistical tests but can also include recently developed measures such as the efficiency gap. It is even now possible to evaluate, with mathematical rigor, whether a specific scheme is extreme relative to the virtually uncountable universe of possible maps. Taken together, these methods for detecting extremes comprise a statistical toolbox to address a wide variety of circumstances that may arise in any of the 50 states. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2018.0526?journalCode=elj |
| 2018 | JA | Making a Case for Two Paths Forward in Light of Gill v. Whitford | McDonald, Michael D.; Magleby, Daniel B.; Krasno, Jonathan; Donahue, Shawn J.; Best, Robin E. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2018.0527] COMMENTS: Gerrymandering dilutes vote power and takes away representational rights. Uses mean median difference for both turnout bias and gerrymandering bias. This is the mean median difference with an additional metric. ABSTRACT: In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gill v. Whitford (2018), we propose two paths forward for establishing manageable standards to identify partisan gerrymanders. One is aimed most particularly at exclusionary gerrymanders and follows the Court’s directive to demonstrate personal and district-specific harms to representational rights. The second challenges mapmakers in the first instance and courts, if needed later, to recognize that entrenchment gerrymanders offend not just representational rights but also the right for all votes to carry the same weight. We put our proposals to a series of tests through applications to post-2010 suspected gerrymanders of congressional districts in Maryland and Ohio along with applications to Massachusetts and Illinois to show that the approaches hold safe district plans that are not gerrymanders. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2018.0527 |
| 2018 | JA | Redistricting Out Representation: Democratic Harms in Splitting Zip Codes | Curiel, John A.; Steelman, Tyler | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2018.0528] COMMENTS: Argues for keeping as many zip codes whole in redistricting. Communities of interest argument. Also argues that this would reduce partisan bias. ABSTRACT: Redistricting poses a potential harm to American voters in limiting choice and accountability at the polls. Although voters still technically retain their right to contact their congressional representatives in order to seek redress for their concerns, we argue that the confusion created when redistricting divides ZIP Codes confounds the constituent-representative link and leaves a substantive minority of voters in representational limbo. ZIP Codes perform a functional role by organizing groups of residents into easily accessible blocs for mail service. However, congressional districts split the ZIP Codes of over 100 million Americans. Splitting ZIP Codes across multiple congressional districts leads to constituents being confused about who their member is and greater inefficiencies for representatives to mail to their constituents. Additionally, several MCs actively ignore out-of-district mail. We posit that constituents from ZIP Codes split by multiple congressional districts will be less likely to recognize, contact, or ideologically identify with their representative. We conducted a population overlap analysis between ZIP Codes and congressional districts to determine the impact of splitting ZIP Codes on a battery of items on the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) from 2008-2016. Our analysis provides evidence that splitting ZIP Codes across multiple congressional districts impairs the constituent-representative link. Finally, we demonstrate the preservation of ZIP Codes in redistricting is feasible and produces a substantive reduction in partisan bias. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2018.0528 |
| 2018 | JA | Locating the Representational Baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts | Duchin, Moon; Gladkova, Taissa; Henninger-Voss, Eugene; Klingensmith, Ben; Newman, Heather; Wheelen, Hannah | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2018.0537] COMMENTS: Argues that Massachusetts congressional map is not a gerrymander because there is no way to draw a Republican majority district. ABSTRACT: Republican candidates often receive between 30% and 40%of the two-way vote share in statewide elections in Massachusetts. For the last three Census cycles, Massachusetts has held 9-10 seats in the House of Representatives, which means that a district can be won with as little as six percent of the statewide vote. Putting these two facts together, it is striking that a Massachusetts Republican has not won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1994. We argue that the underperformance of Republicans in Massachusetts is not attributable to gerrymandering, nor to the failure of Republicans to field House candidates, but is a structural mathematical feature of the actual distribution of votes observable in some recent elections. Several of these elections have a remarkable property in their vote patterns: Republican votes clear 30%, but are distributed so uniformly that they are locked out of the possibility of representation. Though there are more ways of building a valid districting plan than there are particles in the galaxy, every single one of them would produce a 9-0 Democratic delegation. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2018.0537 |
| 2019 | JA | Tests for Unconstitutional Partisan Gerrymandering in a Post-Gill World | Grofman, Bernard | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2019.0551] COMMENTS: Long detailed article. Argues one probably needs multiple measures to prove gerrymander. Talks about expert testimony in Pennsylvania case and how it could be adapted for federal claims. ABSTRACT: I discuss four articles in Election Law Journal on partisan gerrymandering that were written after the Supreme Court’s decision in Gill v. Whitford, and I lay out my own post-Gill views on how best to test for unconstitutionality. Curiel and Steelman (2018) offer a new statewide test for partisan gerrymandering, and Nagle (2019) also offers new statewide tests as well as critiquing previously offered ones. McDonald et al. (2018) offer both district-specific and statewide measures of partisan gerrymandering. Wang et al. (2018) focus on partisan gerrymandering standards that may evolve through state court rather than federal jurisprudence, though like McDonald et al. (2018) they offer both statewide and district-specific approaches. I offer four distinct perspectives: a district-specific approach based on adapting ideas from the racial gerrymandering “vote dilution” literature; a district-specific approach based on adapting ideas from the “race preponderant motive” line of jurisprudence; a third approach that reconciles statewide and district-specific approaches by looking at simulated maps that are computer-generated using traditional districting criteria and asking whether particular districts should be judged as statistical outliers when compared to what would be expected based on those maps; and a fourth approach reconciling statewide and district-specific ideas about detecting partisan gerrymandering in a very different way by making a showing of very substantial statewide gerrymandering effects a hurdle which must be overcome before proceeding to district-specific analyses. In this approach, if a statewide violation is found, the remedy required will only make changes in a delimited set of districts. I argue that, although the Common Cause v. Rucho (2018) court does not describe its post-Gill position in this way, this way of framing the majority opinion in Rucho allows that opinion to be seen as more directly compatible with a district-specific interpretation of Gill. In all my approaches, I emphasize the need to separately delineate standards for unconstitutional “packing” and standards for unconstitutional “cracking”, and I argue that more than one test may be necessary to detect different types of gerrymandering and that satisfactory tests must be able to detect both straightforward and more sophisticated and subtler forms of partisan gerrymandering. I also show how some of the expert witness testimony provided in the only successful challenge to partisan gerrymandering to date, League of Women Voters v. Pennsylvania (2018), can be adapted for use in the federal context. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2019.0551 |
| 2019 | JA | Declination as a Metric to Detect Partisan Gerrymandering | Campisi, Marion; Padilla, Andrea; Ratliff, Thomas; Veomett, Ellen | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2019.0562] COMMENTS: Good article on pros and cons for declination. Also compares it to efficiency gap. ABSTRACT: We explore the Declination d, a new metric intended to detect partisan gerrymandering. We show that when vote share is fixed, d = 0 allows for a wide array of possible seat shares, even when turnout in each district is equal. In particular, if d = 0, the majority party has higher seat share when its average vote share in districts that it wins is closer to the statewide vote share. This range of possible seat shares with d = 0 results in a range of responsiveness, again depending on the average vote share in districts won by the majority party. We also prove what kind of vote-share seat-share pairs can result in d = 0 when the maximum district turnout to minimum district turnout is bounded, and turnout is unrestricted. Within our analyses, we show that Declination cannot detect all forms of packing and cracking, and we compare the Declination to the Efficiency Gap. We show that these two metrics can behave quite differently, and give explicit examples of that occurring, including examples from recent election data. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2019.0562 |
| 2019 | JA | Conflicting Goals of Redistricting: Do Districts That Maximize Competition Reckon with Communities of Interest? | Gimpel, James G.; Harbridge-Yong, Laurel | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2019.0576] COMMENTS: Tension between drawing competitive districts and preserving communities of interest because communities of interest are oftentimes lopsidedly partisan. ABSTRACT: Regardless of who draws the redistricting plan in a state with numerous districts, there are always complaints about the outcome. We suggest that the inherent conflicts among the traditional redistricting criteria make any multi-district plan subject to criticism and vulnerable to litigation. In particular, the mandates to respect communities of interest while drawing competitive districts are frequently irreconcilable. This is because many communities of interest are themselves lopsidedly partisan, and including them whole or undiluted will impede the pathway to achieving an even partisan division in a district’s electorate. Examples drawn from North Carolina and Pennsylvania serve to illustrate the constraints that map drafters face, regardless of for whom they are employed. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2019.0576 |
| 2019 | JA | The Impact of Electoral Arrangements onMinority Representation: District Magnitude and the Election of African American State Legislators | Herrnson, Paul S.; Rouse, Stella M.; Taylor, Jeffrey A. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2019.0581] COMMENTS: Looks at probability of electing African Americans in multi-member districts in Maryland and finds that these candidates are not less likely to be elected from these types of districts even if that had been true in the past. ABSTRACT: Previous research shows that multimember districts (MMDs) disadvantage African American candidates. However, these studies focus on only a few aspects of the electoral process and they may be time bound. Using a new data set, we examine the impact of district magnitude (the number of candidates elected from a single constituency) on the emergence, nomination, and general election of African Americans to the state legislature. Using data from recent elections to the Maryland state legislature, we find no evidence that district magnitude dims the electoral prospects of African American candidates. Our findings suggest that biases attributed to MMDs may have resulted from laws, partisan practices, customs, and political attitudes. The implementation of the Voting Rights Act, broad societal changes, and strategic adjustments by black candidates and voters may have mitigated the effects of previous biases resulting in the election of more African Americans in MMDs and other districts. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/elj.2019.0581 |
| 2019 | JA | Partisan Gerrymandering, Clustering, or Both? A New Approach to a Persistent Question | Powell, Richard J.; Clark, Jesse T.; Dube, Matthew P. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2019.0605] COMMENTS: Takes on the notion that Democrats are naturally gerrymandered due to clustering. Finds this is largely not the case. ABSTRACT: It has long been noted that electing members of the U.S. House of Representatives in single-member, mutually exclusive districts, often leads to discrepancies between the partisanship of the electorate and the party distribution in the House. There has been a spirited debate in the literature about the extent to which this is due to demographic clustering or intentional gerrymandering. This study presents direct tests of both of these potential causes using a simulation-based approach that improves upon similar studies in the past. We find that while there is a significant amount of demographic clustering, redistricting procedures account for a much greater portion of the partisan bias in the House. Furthermore, our results indicate that, in the 113th Congress (2013-15), Republicans were overrepresented in the House by about 16 seats, of which only a few can be attributed to demographic clustering. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2019.0605 |
| 2019 | JA | State Legislative Redistricting: The Effectiveness of Traditional Districting Principles in the 2010 Wave | Sabouni, Hisam; Shelton, Cameron | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2019.0608] COMMENTS: The more traditional districting principles a mapmaker has to abide by, the less likely a partisan gerrymander will result. Though this is measured by overlap of parent and offspring districts. ABSTRACT: Advocates of redistricting reform believe that traditional districting principles (TDPs) were ineffective in constraining partisan gerrymanders during the 2010 redistricting wave. Yet in the wake of League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (2018), many reformers believe the path forward consists of properly quantifying TDPs and demonstrating their violation by partisan gerrymanders. This is a viable path only insofar as TDPs materially constrain the ability of parties to design a map that delivers a seats-votes curve biased in their favor. If not, then enforcement of TDPs may change the configuration of districts without hindering partisan bias. To test whether TDPs constrain partisan gerrymanders, we analyze a complete set of state legislative maps from the 2010 redistricting wave. We measure manipulation by a low degree of overlap between parent and offspring districts which we confirm is connected to the search for partisan gain. We also examine the extent to which the effects of TDPs tend to be concentrated within few districts or spread across many districts. We find that certain legal principles, chief among them respect for communities of interest, raise overlap, possibly by limiting adjustments for partisan gain. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2019.0608 |
| 2019 | JA | A Response to “Tests for Unconstitutional Partisan Gerrymandering in a Post-Gill World” in a Post-Rucho World | Curiel, John A.; Steelman, Tyler | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2019.0612] COMMENTS: Defends their zip code as a basis for redistricting as a good idea contra to Grofman’s critique. Also claim that election measures without strong theory and measurement of link btw MC and constituents likely to fail in litigation. [See RED.039.] ABSTRACT: In this article, we respond to the critique by Bernard Grofman (2019) of our 2018 work published in the Election Law Journal, “Redistricting Out Representation: Democratic Harms in Splitting ZIP Codes”. We pursue two purposes within this response. First, we seek to address some misconceptions and elaborate upon our previous work to demonstrate the applicability and measurement of the constituent-representative link via ZIP codes. Second, we contextualize our work and Grofman’s (2019) counterproposal to develop a standard for measuring and adjudicating gerrymanders in light of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Rucho et al v. Common Cause et al. (2019). We argue for scholars and litigators interested in moving forward in a post-Rucho v. Common Cause world, election outcome measures without the compliment of a strong theory and measurement of the constituent-representative link are prone to failure in litigation. Our work provides this path forward by integrating the constituent-presentative link into a legal framework that bolsters the theory and direct evidence of harm to representation that occurs due to district design. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2019.0612 |
| 2020 | JA | ZIP Codes as Geographic Bases of Representation | Grofman, Bernard; Cervas, Jonathan R. | ELECTION LAW JOURNAL [elj.2020.0687] COMMENTS: Critique of using zip codes – prefer using city and county boundaries and other existing geography. ABSTRACT: We consider the desirability of ZIP codes as the basis for configuring congressional districts. There are several issues. First, it is likely that voters lack knowledge of ZIP code boundaries. Second, ZIP codes may not coincide with existing political subunit boundaries, such as cities or counties whose non-fragmentation is legally important for redistricting. Thus, using ZIP codes would add yet another layer of complexity to districting. Third, ZIP codes do not perfectly coincide with larger census units, such as tracts, or even with smaller units such as census block-groups. Moreover, while districts can be drawn using ZIP codes that seem better in many respects than existing maps, the same is at least as true for line drawing using existing census geography and maintaining city and county boundaries to the greatest extent feasible. Fourth, we find the empirical evidence offered by Curiel and Steelman (2018) that ZIP code splits are a major aspect of the ability of voters to identify their legislator and engage in political communications with them to be less than fully convincing, though we applaud their efforts at data gathering and the care with which they have sought to control for potential confounding factors. We further commend them for their emphasis on the need to put operational content into the abstract and multivocal concept of community of interest, a concept which still is undertheorized, especially in the legal context. LINK:https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2020.0687 |
| 2021 | JA | Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting | Fraga, Bernard; Moskowitz, Daniel; Schneer, Benjamin | POLITICAL BEHAVIOR [fraga2021] COMMENTS: Voters assigned to a new district that better matches their partisanship are more likely to vote. This effect is larger for marginal voters than habitual ones. Model is expressive voting and supports Brunell’s argument about packing like-minded individuals into districts. ABSTRACT: Partisan gerrymandering and polarization have created an electoral landscape where Americans increasingly reside in congressional districts dominated by one party. Are individuals more likely to vote when their partisanship aligns with the partisan composition of the district? Leveraging nationwide voter file data and the redistricting process, we present causal evidence on this question via a longitudinal analysis of individual-level political participation. Tracking turnout before and after a redistricting cycle, where the boundaries of congressional districts change, we observe what happens when registrants experience a shock to the partisan composition of their district. We find turnout increases for individuals assigned to districts aligned with their partisanship as compared to individuals in misaligned districts, consistent with voters deriving expressive benefits from voting for the winning party. By demonstrating how districting influences political participation, our findings suggest a new implication of partisan gerrymandering that may clash with other democratic goals. LINK:https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09685-y |
| 2021 | Recombination: A Family of Markov Chains for Redistricting | DeFord, Daryl; Duchin, Moon; Solomon, Justin | HARVARD DATA SCIENCE REVIEW, Issue 3.1, Winter 2021 [Release 5] COMMENTS: Technical article about how to program computational models to produce a representative sample of nonpartisan maps. ABSTRACT: Districts that hold plurality elections are the favored American device for converting votes into political representation. But control of the district lines can confer a surprising degree of power over the outcomes, even under real-world conditions; abusing this power is called “gerrymandering”. Computational methods are quickly gaining traction as a way to understand the magnitude of gerrymandering and to tease its effects apart from the mere consequences of the system. Proposed districting pans can now be put in context by comparison to large samples of alternative valid plans, holding the political geography constant. In this article, we rethink the question of what makes a good sample for this application. We present and motivate a novel sampling method using spanning trees and use real data to show the method in action. Though the universe of plausible districting plans is forbiddingly vast, our heuristic tests suggest that we can now use randomized techniques to construct a representative sample in a reasonable time. LINK:https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/1ds8ptxu/release/5 |
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| 2019 | JA | The signature of gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common cause | Chin, Andrew; Herschlag, Gregory; Mattingly, Jonathan | SOUTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW [SSRN.3477091] COMMENTS: In-depth look at the models used by Plaintiffs in the North Carolina partisan gerrymandering case. Good intro for someone who does not know much about using the ensemble method of having a computer draw millions of comparative maps. ABSTRACT: In recent years, the U.S. mathematical community has been directing unprecedented attention to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, aided by computational advances and spurred by litigation challenging the spate of extreme partisan redistricting that followed the 2010 census. As North Carolina scholars who have been involved in the landmark Rucho v. Common Cause litigation, we have written this Article with the threefold aim of explaining how the expert analysis of North Carolina’s congressional map was performed, how it was used to substantiate the plaintiffs’ claims at trial and on remand, and crucially, how it may serve to address the justiciability concerns that have long attended the Supreme Court’s partisan gerrymandering jurisprudence and have represented the legal context for our work. LINK:https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3477091 |
| 2021 | OA | How Best to do Prison Population Data Reallocation, i.e., How Best to Mitigate Prison Gerrymandering? | Grofman, Bernard | SOCIAL SCIENCES RESEARCH NETWORK [SSRN.3906274] COMMENTS: Proposes a best-practices rule that involves a recommendation that states copy the practices used in Virginia, in which the residual category of prisoners without an in-state past address, or whose immediate past address is in a different state, be tallied at the prison. ABSTRACT: We review the legal and practical complexities in doing prisoner population data reallocation and discuss differences in the practices in different states and jurisdictions. We emphasize that there are two key complications. (1) how to handle prison populations that do not have an in-state past address, and (2) potential legal differences between how prison populations are to be treated for state legislative (or local) redistricting as opposed to congressional redistricting. We propose a best practices rule. LINK:https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906274 |
| 2021 | A RESPONSE TO: “The Race-Blind Future of Voting Rights” of Jowei Chen & Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos | Duchin, Moon; Spencer, Douglas M. | Yale Law Journal [YLJ.Forum: models, race, and the law] COMMENTS: Critique of Chen and Stephanopoulos article on race-blind redistricting using computer-aided redistricting. Says that the algorithm drawing the districts can, not surprisingly, have huge effects. ABSTRACT: Capitalizing on recent advances in algorithmic sampling, “The Race-Blind Future of Voting Rights” explores the implications of the long-standing conservative dream of certified race neutrality in redistricting. Computers seem promising because they are excellent at not taking race into account, but computers only do what you tell them to do, and the rest of the authors’ apparatus for measuring minority electoral opportunity failed every check of robustness and numerical stability that we applied. How many opportunity districts are there in the current Texas state House plan? Their methods can give any answer from thirty-four to fifty-one, depending on invisible settings. But if we focus only on major technical flaws, we might miss the fundamental fact that race-blind districting would devastate minority political opportunity no matter how it is deployed, just due to the mathematics of single-member districts. In the end, the Article develops an extreme interpretation of a dubious idea proposed by Judge Easterbrook through an empirical study that is unsupported by the methods. LINK:https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/models-race-and-the-law |
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| 2016 | MO | The Loser’s Bonus: Political Geography and Minority Party Representation | Chen, Jowei; Rodden, Jonathan A. | INCOMPLETE DRAFT [losers_bonus_nov2016] COMMENTS: Loser’s bonus generally favors GOP. ABSTRACT: In a majoritarian system where support for two parties is geographically clustered, the minority party is better off with a system of smaller winner-take-all districts than with a polity-wide winner-take-all system. We use automated districting simulations of U.S. states to measure the magnitude of this loser’s bonus in each state, and contrast long-term patterns of partisan representation in the House and Senate. We demonstrate that Republicans benefit from the loser’s bonus in most of the large states of the Northeast and West Coast, while the Democrats benefit elsewhere. On balance, the loser’s bonus is beneficial to the Republicans, and the size of U.S. Congressional districts relative to urban clusters of Democrats is quite well suited for the representation of Republicans in Congress. Our results have implications not only for policy debates and patterns of representation in the United States, but also in other industrialized federations with two tiers of representation and a high correlation between population density and voting behavior. LINK:http://cpd.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ucb.pdf |
| 2020 | JA | Calculated Discrimination: Exposing Racial Gerrymandering Using Computational Methods | Menter, Aviel | COLUMBIA SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY LAW REVIEW [Menter] COMMENTS: Interesting, though no actual evidence. Proposes using simulated districts to detect racial gerrymanders. ABSTRACT: In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court held that challenges to partisan gerrymanders presented a nonjusticiable political question. This decision threatened to discard decades of work by political scientists and other experts, who had developed a myriad of techniques designed to help the courts objectively and unambiguously identify excessively partisan district maps. Simulated redistricting promised to be one of the most effective of these techniques. Simulated redistricting algorithms are computer programs capable of generating thousands of election-district maps, each of which conforms to a set of permissible criteria determined by the relevant state legislature. By measuring the partisan lean of both the automatically generated maps and the map put forth by the state legislature, a court could determine how much of this partisan bias was attributable to the deliberate actions of the legislature, rather than the natural distribution of the state’s population. Rucho ended partisan gerrymandering challenges brought under the U.S. Constitution, but it need not close the book on simulated redistricting. Although originally developed to combat partisan gerrymanders, simulated redistricting algorithms can be repurposed to help courts identify intentional racial gerrymanders. Instead of measuring the partisan bias of automatically generated maps, these programs can gauge improper racial considerations evident in the legislature’s plan and demonstrate the discriminatory intent that produced such an outcome. As long as the redistricting process remains in the hands of state legislatures, there is a threat that constitutionally impermissible considerations will be employed when drawing district plans. Simulated redistricting provides a powerful tool with which courts can detect a hidden unconstitutional motive in the redistricting process. LINK:https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/stlr/article/view/8669 |
| 2019 | JA | Minority Success in Non-Majority Minority Districts: Finding the ‘Sweet Spot’. | Lublin, David; Handley, Lisa; Brunell, Thomas L.; Grofman, Bernard | JOURNAL OF RACE, ETHNICITY, AND POLITICS [minority_success] COMMENTS: Tries to calculate the proportion of minorities in a district under different conditions to give minorities a reasonable opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. ABSTRACT: Though African-American and Latino electoral success in state legislative and congressional elections continues to occur almost entirely in majority-minority districts, minorities now have new opportunities in districts that are only 40-50% minority. This success can primarily be explained in terms of a curvilinear model that generates a “sweet spot” of maximum likelihood of minority candidate electoral success as a function of minority population share of the district and the proportion of the district that votes Republican. Past racial redistricting legal challenges often focused on cracking concentrated racial minorities to prevent the creation of majority-minority districts. Future lawsuits may also follow in the steps of recent successful court challenges against racially motivated packing that resulted in the reduction of minority population percentage in a previously majority-minority district in order to enhance minority opportunity in an adjacent non-majority-minority district. LINK:https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-race-ethnicity-and-politics/article/abs/minority-success-in-nonmajority-minority-districts-finding-the-sweet-spot/E4BDB04876EC4C6B203CCA94A409C2C3 |
| 2019 | JA | The Mask of Neutrality: Judicial Partisan Calculation and Legislative Redistricting | Peterson, Jordan Carr | LAW AND POLICY [Peterson L&P] COMMENTS: Empirics show court-drawn maps are more competitive than commission or legislatively drawn maps, but there is also partisanship there. Judges make districts held by opposing party members more competitive. ABSTRACT: Do judges ruling on redistricting litigation increase electoral competition in congressional races while simultaneously drawing districts favoring their party’s congressional candidates? I offer a novel theory of judicial partisan calculation, arguing that judges draw more competitive districts than legislatures or commissions, but that judge-drawn districts favor the electoral interests of their co-partisans. These claims are reconcilable because judges target districts held by contra-partisan legislators to maximize their co-partisans’ fortunes. I find that Democratic judges draw competitive districts by adding Democratic voters to Republican-held House constituencies. Court-administered redistricting increases competitiveness, ostensibly due to judicial neutrality. This mask of neutrality, however, conceals sophisticated partisan calculation. LINK:https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/lawpol41&div=24&id=&page= |
| 2021 | JA | The use of differential privacy for census data and its impact on redistricting: The case of the 2020 U.S. Census | Kenny, Christopher T.; Kuriwaki, Shiro; McCartan, Cory; Rosenman, Evan T. R.; Simko, Tyler; Imai, Kosuke | SCIENCE ADVANCES [sciadv] COMMENTS: Differential privacy used by census bureau does not work well. It systematically undercounts some neighborhoods and makes one person one vote impossible. ABSTRACT: Census statistics play a key role in public policy decisions and social science research. However, given the risk of revealing individual information, many statistical agencies are considering disclosure control methods based on differential privacy, which add noise to tabulated data. Unlike other applications of differential privacy, however, census statistics must be post-processed after noise injection to be usable. We study the impact of the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest disclosure avoidance system (DAS) on a major application of census statistics, the redrawing of electoral districts. We find that the DAS systematically undercounts the population in mixed-race and mixed-partisan precincts, yielding unpredictable racial and partisan biases. While the DAS leads to a likely violation of the “One Person, One Vote” standard as currently interpreted, it does not prevent accurate predictions of an individual’s race and ethnicity. Our findings underscore the difficulty of balancing accuracy and respondent privacy in the Census. LINK:https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abk3283 |
| 2020 | JA | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation | Haas, Christian; Hachadoorian, Lee; Kimbrough, Steven O.; Miller, Peter; Murphy, Frederic | PLOS ONE [seed fill shift repair] COMMENTS: Other algorithms do not produce random samples. They propose a new method that produces map that can be a starting point for deliberating what constitutes a good map. ABSTRACT: Political redistricting is the redrawing of electoral district boundaries. It is normally undertaken to reflect population changes. The process can be abused, in what is called gerrymandering, to favor one party or interest group over another, resulting thereby in broadly undemocratic outcomes that misrepresent the views of the voters. Gerrymandering is especially vexing in the United States. This paper introduces an algorithm, with an implementation, for creating districting plans (whether for political redistricting or for other districting applications). The algorithm, Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair (SFSR), is demonstrated for Congressional redistricting in American states. SFSR is able to create thousands of valid redistricting plans, which may then be used as points of departure for public deliberation regarding how best to redistrict a given polity. The main objectives of this paper are: (i) to present SFSR in a broadly accessible form, including code that implements it and test data, so that it may be used for both civic deliberations by the public and for research purposes. (ii) to make the case for what SFSR essays to do, which is to approach redistricting, and districting generally, from a constraint satisfaction perspective and from the perspective of producing a plurality of feasible solutions that may then serve in subsequent deliberations. To further these goals, we make the code publicly available. The paper presents, for illustration purposes, a corpus of 11,206 valid redistricting plans for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (produced by SFSR), using the 2017 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics. Also, the paper presents 1,000 plans for each of the states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, using the 2018 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics on these plans and the computations involved in their creation. LINK:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237935 |
| 2018 | OA | Pushing Boundaries: Political Redistricting and Consumer Credit | Akey, Pat; Dobridge, Christine; Heimer, Rawley Z.; Lewellen, Stefan | SSRN UNPUBLISHED [SSRN-id3031604] COMMENTS: Funny boundaries result in lack of competitiveness which somehow causes constituents to have less access to credit, which then leads to less voting. ABSTRACT: Consumers lose access to credit when their congressional district boundaries are irregularly redrawn to benefit a political party (i.e., are gerrymandered). We identify this effect by matching a longitudinal panel of consumer credit data with changes in congressional district boundaries following decennial censuses. Reductions in credit access are concentrated in states that allow elected politicians to draw political boundaries and in districts where subsequent congressional elections are less competitive. We find similar reductions in credit access when state senate district boundaries are irregularly redrawn and when states make it more difficult for constituents to vote. Overall, our findings are consistent with theories suggesting that less-competitive political races reduce politicians’ incentives to cater to their constituents’ preferences. LINK:https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3031604 |
| 2020 | JA | Trade-offs in Fair Redistricting | Schutzman, Zachary | AIES, FEBRUARY 2020 [trade-offs fair redistricting] COMMENTS: Automated redistricting that requires highest partisan symmetry is inconsistent with a method that requires highest degree of compactness. Reaffirms our knowledge that redistricting criteria are often in conflict with one another. ABSTRACT: What constitutes a “fair” electoral districting plan is a discussion dating back to the founding of the United States and, in light of several recent court cases, mathematical developments, and the approaching 2020 U.S. Census, is still a fiercely debated topic today. In light of the growing desire and ability to use algorithmic tools in drawing these districts, we discuss two prototypical formulations of fairness in this domain: drawing the districts by a neutral procedure or drawing them to intentionally induce an equitable electoral outcome. We then generate a large sample of districting plans for North Carolina and Pennsylvania and consider empirically how compactness and partisan symmetry, as instantiations of these frameworks, tradeoff with each other; prioritizing the value of one of these necessarily comes at a cost in the other. LINK:https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3375627.3375802 |
AUTHOR INDEX
| Author | Year | Title |
| Akey, Pat | 2018 | Pushing Boundaries: Political Redistricting and Consumer Credit |
| Arrington, Theodore S. | 2016 | A Practical Procedure for Detecting a Partisan Gerrymander |
| Best, Robin E. | 2016 | Considering the Prospects for Establishing a Packing Gerrymandering Standard |
| Best, Robin E. | 2017 | Authors’ Response- Values and Validations: Proper Criteria for Comparing Standards for Packing Gerrymanders |
| Best, Robin E. | 2018 | Making a Case for Two Paths Forward in Light of Gill v. Whitford |
| Brunell, Thomas L. | 2019 | Minority Success in Non-Majority Minority Districts: Finding the ‘Sweet Spot’. |
| Campisi, Marion | 2019 | Declination as a Metric to Detect Partisan Gerrymandering |
| Caughey, Devin | 2017 | Partisan Gerrymandering and the Political Process: Effects on Roll-Call Voting and State Policies |
| Cervas, Jonathan R. | 2018 | Can State Courts Cure Partisan Gerrymandering: Lessons from League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (2018) |
| Cervas, Jonathan R. | 2020 | ZIP Codes as Geographic Bases of Representation |
| Chen, Jowei | 2016 | The Loser’s Bonus: Political Geography and Minority Party Representation |
| Chen, Jowei | 2017 | The Impact of Political Geography on Wisconsin Redistricting: An Analysis of Wisconsin’s Act 43 Assembly Districting Plan |
| Chin, Andrew | 2019 | The signature of gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common cause |
| Cho, Wendy K. Tam | 2016 | Toward a Talismanic Redistricting Tool: A Computational Method for Identifying Extreme Redistricting Plans |
| Clark, Jesse T. | 2019 | Partisan Gerrymandering, Clustering, or Both? A New Approach to a Persistent Question |
| Curiel, John A. | 2018 | Redistricting Out Representation: Democratic Harms in Splitting Zip Codes |
| Curiel, John A. | 2019 | A Response to “Tests for Unconstitutional Partisan Gerrymandering in a Post-Gill World” in a Post-Rucho World |
| de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin | 2013 | Evidence in Voting Rights Act Litigation: Producing Accurate Estimates of Racial Voting Patterns |
| DeFord, Daryl | 2021 | Recombination: A Family of Markov Chains for Redistricting |
| Delamater, Paul L. | 2018 | Congressional Redistricting: Keeping Communities Together? |
| Dobridge, Christine | 2018 | Pushing Boundaries: Political Redistricting and Consumer Credit |
| Donahue, Shawn J. | 2016 | Considering the Prospects for Establishing a Packing Gerrymandering Standard |
| Donahue, Shawn J. | 2017 | Authors’ Response- Values and Validations: Proper Criteria for Comparing Standards for Packing Gerrymanders |
| Donahue, Shawn J. | 2018 | Making a Case for Two Paths Forward in Light of Gill v. Whitford |
| Dowling, Conor M. | 2017 | From the Constituent’s Eye: Experimental Evidence on the District Selection Preferences of Individuals |
| Dube, Matthew P. | 2019 | Partisan Gerrymandering, Clustering, or Both? A New Approach to a Persistent Question |
| Duchin, Moon | 2018 | Locating the Representational Baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts |
| Duchin, Moon | 2021 | Recombination: A Family of Markov Chains for Redistricting |
| Duchin, Moon | 2021 | A RESPONSE TO: “The Race-Blind Future of Voting Rights” of Jowei Chen & Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos |
| Eguia, Jon X. | 2020 | Artificial Partisan Advantage in Redistricting |
| Fifield, Benjamin | 2020 | The Essential Role of Empirical Validation in Legislative Redistricting Simulation |
| Fraga, Bernard | 2021 | Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting |
| Friedler, Sorelle A. | 2019 | Automated Congressional Redistricting |
| Geras, Matthew J. | 2018 | The Implications of Apportionment on Quality Candidate Emergence and Electoral Competition |
| Gimpel, James G. | 2019 | Conflicting Goals of Redistricting: Do Districts That Maximize Competition Reckon with Communities of Interest? |
| Gladkova, Taissa | 2018 | Locating the Representational Baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts |
| Goedert, Nicholas | 2017 | The Pseudoparadox of Partisan Mapmaking and Congressional Competition |
| Grofman, Bernard | 2016 | Public Hearings and Congressional Redistricting: Evidence from the Western United States 2011-2012 |
| Grofman, Bernard | 2017 | Crafting a Judicially Manageable Standard for Partisan Gerrymandering: Five Necessary Elements |
| Grofman, Bernard | 2018 | Can State Courts Cure Partisan Gerrymandering: Lessons from League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (2018) |
| Grofman, Bernard | 2019 | Tests for Unconstitutional Partisan Gerrymandering in a Post-Gill World |
| Grofman, Bernard | 2019 | Minority Success in Non-Majority Minority Districts: Finding the ‘Sweet Spot’. |
| Grofman, Bernard | 2020 | ZIP Codes as Geographic Bases of Representation |
| Grofman, Bernard | 2021 | How Best to do Prison Population Data Reallocation, i.e., How Best to Mitigate Prison Gerrymandering? |
| Haas, Christian | 2020 | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
| Hachadoorian, Lee | 2020 | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
| Handley, Lisa | 2019 | Minority Success in Non-Majority Minority Districts: Finding the ‘Sweet Spot’. |
| Harbridge-Yong, Laurel | 2019 | Conflicting Goals of Redistricting: Do Districts That Maximize Competition Reckon with Communities of Interest? |
| Heimer, Rawley Z. | 2018 | Pushing Boundaries: Political Redistricting and Consumer Credit |
| Henderson, John A. | 2016 | Cause or Effect? Turnout in Hispanic Majority-Minority Districts |
| Henderson, Michael | 2017 | From the Constituent’s Eye: Experimental Evidence on the District Selection Preferences of Individuals |
| Henninger-Voss, Eugene | 2018 | Locating the Representational Baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts |
| Herrnson, Paul S. | 2019 | The Impact of Electoral Arrangements on Minority Representation: District Magnitude and the Election of African American State Legislators |
| Herschlag, Gregory | 2019 | The signature of gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common cause |
| Hicks, William D. | 2018 | Revisiting Majority-Minority Districts and Black Representation |
| Huffman, Scott H. | 2015 | Keeping Up with the Congressmen: Evaluating Constituents’ Awareness of Redistricting |
| Imai, Kosuke | 2020 | The Essential Role of Empirical Validation in Legislative Redistricting Simulation |
| Imai, Kosuke | 2021 | The use of differential privacy for census data and its impact on redistricting: The case of the 2020 U.S. Census |
| Kawahara, Jun | 2020 | The Essential Role of Empirical Validation in Legislative Redistricting Simulation |
| Kenny, Christopher T. | 2020 | The Essential Role of Empirical Validation in Legislative Redistricting Simulation |
| Kenny, Christopher T. | 2021 | The use of differential privacy for census data and its impact on redistricting: The case of the 2020 U.S. Census |
| Kimbrough, Steven O. | 2020 | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
| Kirkland, Justin H. | 2015 | Representation, neighboring districts, and party loyalty in the U.S. Congress |
| Klarner, Carl E. | 2018 | Revisiting Majority-Minority Districts and Black Representation |
| Klingensmith, Ben | 2018 | Locating the Representational Baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts |
| Krasno, Jonathan | 2016 | Considering the Prospects for Establishing a Packing Gerrymandering Standard |
| Krasno, Jonathan | 2017 | Authors’ Response- Values and Validations: Proper Criteria for Comparing Standards for Packing Gerrymanders |
| Krasno, Jonathan | 2018 | Making a Case for Two Paths Forward in Light of Gill v. Whitford |
| Kuriwaki, Shiro | 2021 | The use of differential privacy for census data and its impact on redistricting: The case of the 2020 U.S. Census |
| Ladewig, Jeffrey W. | 2017 | Appearances Do Matter: Congressional District Compactness and Electoral Turnout |
| Lawrence, Christopher N. | 2015 | Keeping Up with the Congressmen: Evaluating Constituents’ Awareness of Redistricting |
| Levin, Harry A. | 2019 | Automated Congressional Redistricting |
| Lewellen, Stefan | 2018 | Pushing Boundaries: Political Redistricting and Consumer Credit |
| Liu, Yan Y. | 2016 | Toward a Talismanic Redistricting Tool: A Computational Method for Identifying Extreme Redistricting Plans |
| Lublin, David | 2019 | Minority Success in Non-Majority Minority Districts: Finding the ‘Sweet Spot’. |
| Magleby, Daniel B. | 2016 | Considering the Prospects for Establishing a Packing Gerrymandering Standard |
| Magleby, Daniel B. | 2017 | Authors’ Response- Values and Validations: Proper Criteria for Comparing Standards for Packing Gerrymanders |
| Magleby, Daniel B. | 2018 | A New Approach for Developing Neutral Redistricting Plans |
| Magleby, Daniel B. | 2018 | Making a Case for Two Paths Forward in Light of Gill v. Whitford |
| Mattingly, Jonathan | 2019 | The signature of gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common cause |
| McCartan, Cory | 2021 | The use of differential privacy for census data and its impact on redistricting: The case of the 2020 U.S. Census |
| McDonald, Michael D. | 2016 | Considering the Prospects for Establishing a Packing Gerrymandering Standard |
| McDonald, Michael D. | 2017 | Authors’ Response- Values and Validations: Proper Criteria for Comparing Standards for Packing Gerrymanders |
| McDonald, Michael D. | 2018 | Making a Case for Two Paths Forward in Light of Gill v. Whitford |
| McGhee, Eric | 2017 | Measuring Efficiency in Redistricting |
| McGhee, Eric | 2017 | Rejoinder to “Considering the Prospects for Establishing a Packing Gerrymandering Standard” |
| Menter, Aviel | 2020 | Calculated Discrimination: Exposing Racial Gerrymandering Using Computational Methods |
| Miller, Peter | 2016 | Public Hearings and Congressional Redistricting: Evidence from the Western United States 2011-2012 |
| Miller, Peter | 2020 | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
| Mosesson, Daniel B. | 2018 | A New Approach for Developing Neutral Redistricting Plans |
| Moskowitz, Daniel | 2021 | Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting |
| Murphy, Frederic | 2020 | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
| Nagle, John F. | 2015 | Measures of Partisan Bias for Legislating Fair Elections |
| Nagle, John F. | 2016 | How Competitive Should a Fair Single Member Districting Plan Be? |
| Newman, Heather | 2018 | Locating the Representational Baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts |
| Ocampo, Angela X | 2018 | The Wielding Influence of Political Networks: Representation in Majority-Latino Districts |
| Padilla, Andrea | 2019 | Declination as a Metric to Detect Partisan Gerrymandering |
| Pegden, Wesley | 2017 | A Partisan Districting Protocol With Provably Nonpartisan Outcomes |
| Peterson, Jordan Carr | 2019 | The Mask of Neutrality: Judicial Partisan Calculation and Legislative Redistricting |
| Powell, Richard J. | 2019 | Partisan Gerrymandering, Clustering, or Both? A New Approach to a Persistent Question |
| Procaccia, Ariel D. | 2017 | A Partisan Districting Protocol With Provably Nonpartisan Outcomes |
| Ratliff, Thomas | 2019 | Declination as a Metric to Detect Partisan Gerrymandering |
| Remlinger, Brian A. | 2018 | An Antidote for Gobbledygook: Organizing the Judge’s Partisan Gerrymandering Toolkit into Tests of Opportunity and Outcome |
| Rodden, Jonathan A. | 2016 | The Loser’s Bonus: Political Geography and Minority Party Representation |
| Rogowski, Jon C. | 2017 | Race, Representation, and the Voting Rights Act |
| Rosenman, Evan T. R. | 2021 | The use of differential privacy for census data and its impact on redistricting: The case of the 2020 U.S. Census |
| Rossiter, Kayln M. | 2018 | Congressional Redistricting: Keeping Communities Together? |
| Rouse, Stella M. | 2019 | The Impact of Electoral Arrangements on Minority Representation: District Magnitude and the Election of African American State Legislators |
| Sabouni, Hisam | 2019 | State Legislative Redistricting: The Effectiveness of Traditional Districting Principles in the 2010 Wave |
| Schneer, Benjamin | 2021 | Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting |
| Schuit, Sophie | 2017 | Race, Representation, and the Voting Rights Act |
| Schutzman, Zachary | 2020 | Trade-offs in Fair Redistricting |
| Sekhon, Jasjeet S. | 2016 | Cause or Effect? Turnout in Hispanic Majority-Minority Districts |
| Shelton, Cameron | 2019 | State Legislative Redistricting: The Effectiveness of Traditional Districting Principles in the 2010 Wave |
| Simko, Tyler | 2021 | The use of differential privacy for census data and its impact on redistricting: The case of the 2020 U.S. Census |
| Smith, Daniel A. | 2018 | Revisiting Majority-Minority Districts and Black Representation |
| Solomon, Justin | 2021 | Recombination: A Family of Markov Chains for Redistricting |
| Spencer, Douglas M. | 2021 | A RESPONSE TO: “The Race-Blind Future of Voting Rights” of Jowei Chen & Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos |
| Steelman, Tyler | 2018 | Redistricting Out Representation: Democratic Harms in Splitting Zip Codes |
| Steelman, Tyler | 2019 | A Response to “Tests for Unconstitutional Partisan Gerrymandering in a Post-Gill World” in a Post-Rucho World |
| Tamas, Bernard | 2017 | American Disproportionality: A Historical Analysis of Partisan Bias in Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives |
| Tausanovitch, Chris | 2017 | Partisan Gerrymandering and the Political Process: Effects on Roll-Call Voting and State Policies |
| Taylor, Jeffrey A. | 2019 | The Impact of Electoral Arrangements on Minority Representation: District Magnitude and the Election of African American State Legislators |
| Titiunik, Rocio | 2016 | Cause or Effect? Turnout in Hispanic Majority-Minority Districts |
| Veomett, Ellen | 2018 | Efficiency Gap, Voter Turnout, and the Efficiency Principle |
| Veomett, Ellen | 2019 | Declination as a Metric to Detect Partisan Gerrymandering |
| Wang, Samuel S.-H. | 2016 | Three Practical Tests for Gerrymandering: Application to Maryland and Wisconsin |
| Wang, Samuel S.-H. | 2018 | An Antidote for Gobbledygook: Organizing the Judge’s Partisan Gerrymandering Toolkit into Tests of Opportunity and Outcome |
| Warrington, Gregory S. | 2017 | Quantifying Gerrymandering Using the Vote Distribution |
| Warrington, Gregory S. | 2018 | A Comparison of Partisan-Gerrymandering Measures |
| Warshaw, Christopher | 2017 | Partisan Gerrymandering and the Political Process: Effects on Roll-Call Voting and State Policies |
| Wheelen, Hannah | 2018 | Locating the Representational Baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts |
| Williams, Ben | 2018 | An Antidote for Gobbledygook: Organizing the Judge’s Partisan Gerrymandering Toolkit into Tests of Opportunity and Outcome |
| Williams, R. Lucas | 2015 | Representation, neighboring districts, and party loyalty in the U.S. Congress |
| Williamson, Ryan D. | 2018 | Examining the Effects of Partisan Redistricting on Candidate Entry Decisions |
| Winburn, Jonathan | 2017 | From the Constituent’s Eye: Experimental Evidence on the District Selection Preferences of Individuals |
| Wong, David W. S. | 2018 | Congressional Redistricting: Keeping Communities Together? |
| Yu, Dingli | 2017 | A Partisan Districting Protocol With Provably Nonpartisan Outcomes |
Last Updated December 12, 2022