Some may wish to note that the Social Science Research Network has
released two election related papers by Kathy Dopp:
A Single Compactness Measure for Legislative Redistricting, May 31, 2011
Abstract:
Legislative districts in the 50 states are being redrawn following the
completion of the 2010 United States census. Thirty-five states require
that districts are compact, which is believed to make gerrymandering –
designing legislative districts so as to advantage one political party –
more difficult. There are now more than a dozen proposed competing
numerical measures of the relative compactness of legislative districts.
This article demonstrates that nine of the proposed measures of
compactness do not reliably measure compactness. Pictorial
counterexamples show that these nine proposed measures of area
compactness assign the exact same value to shapes having visually
distinct compactness levels. Next, this paper mathematically proves that
all area-to-perimeter or area to square-of-perimeter measures (or their
reciprocals or square roots) rank the compactness of any two sets of
redistricting plans in the exact same order. Thus, these reliable
proposed measures of district compactness are equivalent to the simplest
such measure defined as the ratio of area to the square of the
perimeter. An index of compactness is conceptually and computationally
best when it has a maximum value of one (1) when the area is as compact
as a circle, a minimum value approaching zero when the area’s perimeter
is very large compared to its area, and provides a direct comparison of
any two districts’ compactness regardless of district area size. This
compactness measure is 4π times the ratio of the area of the district to
the square-of-its-perimeter, known in mathematics as the isoperimetric
quotient. This paper concludes by briefly setting the general context
within which a compactness measure is applied to compare proposed
district plans meeting other crucial considerations.
Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting Flaws and Benefits of IRV, June 5, 2011
Abstract:
After the United States' 2000 Presidential election, in which Ralph
Nader’s candidacy caused G.W.Bush to win rather than Al Gore, a Maryland
nonprofit organization led a movement to adopt the instant runoff voting
(IRV) method of counting rank choice ballots. IRV was proposed to solve
the spoiler effect in the case where a minor third candidate siphons off
enough votes to cause the winner of an election to be the second most
popular candidate. Presidential elections in 1844, 1848, 1884, 1912, and
2000 were likely not won by the most popular candidate. However, instant
runoff voting does not have much academic support. This paper examines a
list of IRV’s flaws and benefits, and concludes that IRV threatens the
fairness, accuracy, timeliness, and economy of U.S. elections. Scholars
have proposed several other alternative electoral methods that preserve
existing voter rights and improve upon the plurality method. What
features should we look for in an alternative electoral method?
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