Analyzing districts with data and random walks

Diana Davis
Phillips Exeter Academy
https://dianadavis.github.io/

Date(s) : 08/07/2022 iCal
11h00 - 12h00

In the United States, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing political district boundaries in a way that advantages one group (political party, racial group, candidate) over another. Many people have tried and failed to define a metric to convincingly prove that a districting plan is designed in a biased way, but a recent method using random walks is very promising. I’ll talk about work that I did with a group of 40 undergraduates did in summer 2020, to do the background data work necessary to measure gerrymandering. I’ll also talk about how to measure “fairness.” There will be lots of pictures.