Category: Analysis

It is tempting to assume that gerrymadnering requires the presence of oddly shaped districts.  After all, the term gerrymandering derives from the salamander-shaped maps produced by Massachusetts’s 1812 Governor Elbridge Gerry, and pictures of that meandering district are practically required in any discussion of gerrymandering.

The story goes that the irregularly shaped boundary attempts to include or exclude particular voters from the district.  Although irregular boundaries might well cause one to suspect gerrymandering, it is quite possible for a gerrymandered map to have quite regular districts. Oddly shaped districts, such as like North Carolina’s 12th congressional district and Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district, make provocative tee-shirts and posters, but they are  only a symptom and not the point of Gerrymandering . Continue reading “Gerrymandering is Not about Oddly Shaped Districts”

A Firewall is a buffer used to block unauthorized access.  We adapt the term ‘Firewall,’ in the context of gerrymandering, to describe a districting plan that artificially protects the power of a political party.  What follows is an exposition on how we discovered a Firewall in the enacted districting plan for the Wisconsin General Assembly  that protects the Republican Party from losing the majority of the seats.

For districting plans of the Wisconsin General Assembly, we generate thousands of compliant redistricting plans.  To evaluate the enacted districting plan (the Act 43 plan), we ask if how many officials are elected by each party for each plan for a given a set of votes: Each plan in the ensemble will generate a certain number of Democrats and a complementary number of Republicans (ignoring independent candidates), and we can construct a histogram that measures the number of representatives from each party, out of the 99 available seats.

For example, when looking at the Wisconsin General Assembly districts, we construct histograms of the projected number of Republican elected officials that would have won based on 2012, 2014, and 2016 voting data.

Continue reading “Firewalls”