Geometry, inference, complexity, and democracy

DOI10.1090/BULL/1708MaRDI QIDQ5146571zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Jordan S. Ellenberg

Publication date 26 January 2021

Published in Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10879

zbMATH Keywords

gerrymanderingdemocracypolitical decisionsfair districting

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History, political science (91F10) Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to game theory, economics, and finance (91-02) Voting theory (91B12)

Abstract: Decisions about how the population of the United States should be divided into legislative districts have powerful and not fully understood effects on the outcomes of elections. The problem of understanding what we might mean by "fair districting" intertwines mathematical, political, and legal reasoning; but only in recent years has the academic mathematical community gotten directly involved in the process. I'll report on recent progress in this area, how newly developed mathematical tools have affected real political decisions, and what remains to be done. This survey represents the content of a lecture presented by the author in the Current Events Bulletin session of the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January 2020.

Recommendations

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Cites work

• A formula goes to court: partisan gerrymandering and the efficiency gap
• Assessing significance in a Markov chain without mixing
• Expansion of product replacement graphs
• Measuring political gerrymandering
• Rotor-routing and spanning trees on planar graphs
• The Bernardi Process and Torsor Structures on Spanning Trees

Cited in

(5)

• Mathematics, word problems, common sense, and artificial intelligence
• Geometry in the courtroom
• Political geometry. Rethinking redistricting in the US with math, law, and everything in between
• Three applications of entropy to gerrymandering
• ELECTORAL MALDISTRICTING

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