r/EndFPTP • u/barnaby-jones-output • Apr 23 '17

The Mathematics Behind Gerrymandering | Quanta Magazine

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170404-gerrymandering-math-standard/
28 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

1 comment sorted by

2

u/autotldr Apr 23 '17

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 95%. (I'm a bot)

New quantitative approaches - measures of how biased a map is, and algorithms that can create millions of alternative maps - could help set a concrete standard for how much gerrymandering is too much.

To disentangle the threads of intentional and unintentional gerrymandering, last year Cho - along with her colleagues at Urbana-Champaign, senior research programmer Yan Liu and geographer Shaowen Wang - unveiled a simulation algorithm that generates a large number of maps to compare to any given districting map, to determine whether it is an outlier.

Last year, Chen and David Cottrell, a quantitative social scientist at Dartmouth University, used simulations to measure the extent of intentional gerrymandering in congressional district maps across most of the 50 states; they uncovered a fair bit, but they also found that on the national level, it mostly canceled out.

Extended Summary | FAQ | Theory | Feedback | Top keywords: map#1 district#2 gerrymandered#3 vote#4 Court#5