Abating gerrymandering by mandating fairness
Files
First author draft
Date
2020
DOI
Authors
Benadè, Gerdus
Procaccia, Ariel D.
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
Johannes Benade, Ariel D Procaccia. 2020. "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.