Abating gerrymandering by mandating fairness

Abstract

Political redistricting has been at the center of a rancorous public and legal debate overvoting rights and partisanship in the U.S. Even in cases where there is a desire to craft districtings that are acceptable to both sides of the aisle, it is unclear how to do so. Our proposed approach to this problem combines fair division and optimization; at its heart is a rigorous notion of fairness for districtings, which we call the fair coin flip guarantee. We apply our approach to district four U.S. states, and find that enforcing fairness does not come at a significant cost to traditional measures of quality.