Understanding Voting Patterns and Interactions with Gerrymandering

Project Summary

This project seeks to understand voting patterns and their effect on election outcomes across geography and time. This involves examining precinct-level votes across a large array of historical votes (including 2020 and as far back as 2012). Students will employ a variety of techniques in dimension reduction to uncover large-scale voting patterns and investigate the evolution of voting patterns across the decade. This work will help answer questions like "did the suburbs vote with the cities?" The students will use voting patterns to explore the "stability" of gerrymandering as they compare election outcomes under certain maps compared with large ensembles of non-partisan maps.

This project is part of an ongoing set of projects by the sponsoring faculty around Voting, Gerrymandering and Democracy. See their blog ( https://sites.duke.edu/quantifyinggerrymandering/) for more information and projects from previous years of Data+ and Bass Connections.


Project Leads: Greg Herschlag, Jonathan Mattingly

Themes and Categories
Interdisciplinary Inquiry, Public Policy
Data+, Gerrymandering
Year
2021
Contact
Paul Bendich
Mathematics
bendich@math.duke.edu
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