Abstract: In June 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision Rucho v. Common Cause, a bitterly divided court decided 5-4 that federal courts cannot decide whether a state's districts exhibit extreme gerrymandering that violates the constitution. This chapter discusses how gerrymandering is accomplished and looks at how hundreds of mathematicians worked on developing models that try to objectively define gerrymandering. The 2019 Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering basically boiled down to whether the court thought that the North Carolina district map (drawn by Republicans) and/or the Maryland district map (drawn by Democrats) was unconstitutional. The chapter introduces the basic mathematics behind drawing a lot of “reasonable” maps of North Carolina districts. The chance that a map is chosen depends on how well the map meets the four criteria: compactness, population equality across districts, minimal splitting of counties, and racial gerrymandering constraints.
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-08-31
Language: en
Type: other
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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