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Gerrymandering and Compactness: Implementation Flexibility and Abuse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2020

Richard Barnes Open the ORCID record for Richard Barnes [Opens in a new window]  and
Justin Solomon
Richard Barnes*
Affiliation:
Energy & Resources Group, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA94720, USA. Email: richard.barnes@berkeley.edu Berkeley Institute for Data Science, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA94720,  USA Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, Cambridge, MA02139,  USA. Email: jsolomon@mit.edu
Justin Solomon
Affiliation:
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, Cambridge, MA02139,  USA. Email: jsolomon@mit.edu
*
Corresponding author Richard Barnes
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Abstract

Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which districts and districting plans can be compared. However, measurement values are affected by both noise and the compounding effects of seemingly innocuous implementation decisions. Such issues will arise for any measure. As a case study demonstrating the effect, we show that commonly used measures of geometric compactness for district boundaries are affected by several factors irrelevant to fairness or compliance with civil rights law. We further show that an adversary could manipulate measurements to affect the assessment of a given plan. This instability complicates using these measurements as legislative or judicial standards to counteract unfair redistricting practices. This paper accompanies the release of packages in C++, Python, and R that correctly, efficiently, and reproducibly calculate a variety of compactness scores.

Keywords

spatial analysisgeographic information systemsnumerical methods
Type
Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 448 - 466
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by Jeff Gill

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Supplementary material: Link

Barnes and Solomon Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/B8JYZW
Link