Detecting Gerrymandering with Mathematics

Sophie Guo, Math/PoliSci major, Bridget Dou, ECE/CompSci major, Sachet Bangia, Econ/CompSci major, and Christy Vaughn spent ten weeks studying different procedures for drawing congressional boundaries, and quantifying the effects of these procedures on the fairness of actual election results. Project Results There has already been research done with North Carolina districts, described in http://today.duke.edu/2014/10/mathofredistricting. There, Jonathan...

Martin Guo (MIDS), Dani Trejo (CS), James Wang (CS/Math), and Grayson York (Math/CS) spent ten weeks building tools to understand voting patterns and gerrymandering of districts in North Carolina. They used dimension reduction techniques to cluster different elections into common groups, and they tested various methods for generating synthetic elections...