North Carolina’s constitution requires that state legislative districts should not split counties. However, counties must be split to comply with the “one person, one vote” mandate of the U.S. Supreme Court. Given that counties must be split, the North Carolina legislature and courts have provided guidelines that seek to reduce counties split across districts while also complying with the “one person, one vote” criteria. Under these guidelines, the counties are separated into clusters. For a great explainer about the County Clustering problem see this blog entry on Districks.
A group of high school students from the NC School of Science and Mathematics worked with us over the last academic year and summer to develop computer algorithms to optimally cluster counties according to the guidelines set by the court in 2015. We recently released an article that presents the algorithm along with publicly accessible code which anyone can use.
Additionally, in our article, we use this to investigate the optimality and uniqueness of the enacted clusters under the 2017 redistricting process. We verify that the enacted clusters are optimal, but find other optimal choices. We emphasize that the tool we provide lists all possible optimal county clusterings. We also explore the stability of clustering under changing statewide populations and project what the county clusters may look like in the next redistricting cycle beginning in 2020/2021.
The posting to the ArXiv can be found here.
The article is now published and can be found here.
The code is referenced in the ArXiv post, and may also be accessed here.
[Edits: Added like to Districks explainer (9/4/2019)]
