Quantifying Gerrymandering

One of the principle visualizations we have used to explore and and communicate our results is the Marginal Box-plot. Marginal box plots were one of the principle graphics presented in Redistricting: Drawing the line , Evaluating Partisan Gerrymandering in Wisconsin, and the  group’s testimony in Common Cause v. Rucho.

The box-plots give a way to visually spot anomalous properties in a given redistricting plan by summarizing the structure of a typical plan, drawn without overt partisan considerations. For example, they can help identify what districts have been packed or cracked, showing which districts have many more or many less votes for a certain party than expected. The marginal box-plot give a baseline with which a given map should be compared.

Two prototypical examples of marginal box-plots are giving below. They summarize what we would expect  from redistricting of  North Carolina in to 13 Congressional districts and viewed through the lens of the actual votes cast in the 2012 and 2016 congressional elections.

Continue reading “Marginal Box-Plots: Summarizing what is Typical”

Democracy is typically equated with expressing the will of the people through government. In a Republic, the people elect representatives who then act on their behalf and derive their political mandate from having won the election.

Possible corruption of the  electoral results is often framed in terms of voter suppression, voter fraud, or the undo sway of money on people’s votes. Once the votes are collected, once the access to information and the ballot box is unfettered, all that remains to register the will of the people is to count each vote once and only once.

Yet,  by varying how districts are drawn one can cause tremendous variation  in the outcome of the elections without changing a single vote. There is so much variability, that one might wonder if the effect is greater all the previously mentioned effects combined.  Continue reading “Hearing the Will of the People”

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”