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Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation
Political redistricting is the redrawing of electoral district boundaries. It is normally undertaken to reflect population changes. The process can be abused, in what is called gerrymandering, to favor one party or interest group over another, resulting thereby in broadly undemocratic outcomes that...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Public Library of Science
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7485828/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32915791 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237935 |
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author | Haas, Christian Hachadoorian, Lee Kimbrough, Steven O. Miller, Peter Murphy, Frederic |
author_facet | Haas, Christian Hachadoorian, Lee Kimbrough, Steven O. Miller, Peter Murphy, Frederic |
author_sort | Haas, Christian |
collection | PubMed |
description | Political redistricting is the redrawing of electoral district boundaries. It is normally undertaken to reflect population changes. The process can be abused, in what is called gerrymandering, to favor one party or interest group over another, resulting thereby in broadly undemocratic outcomes that misrepresent the views of the voters. Gerrymandering is especially vexing in the United States. This paper introduces an algorithm, with an implementation, for creating districting plans (whether for political redistricting or for other districting applications). The algorithm, Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair (SFSR), is demonstrated for Congressional redistricting in American states. SFSR is able to create thousands of valid redistricting plans, which may then be used as points of departure for public deliberation regarding how best to redistrict a given polity. The main objectives of this paper are: (i) to present SFSR in a broadly accessible form, including code that implements it and test data, so that it may be used for both civic deliberations by the public and for research purposes. (ii) to make the case for what SFSR essays to do, which is to approach redistricting, and districting generally, from a constraint satisfaction perspective and from the perspective of producing a plurality of feasible solutions that may then serve in subsequent deliberations. To further these goals, we make the code publicly available. The paper presents, for illustration purposes, a corpus of 11,206 valid redistricting plans for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (produced by SFSR), using the 2017 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics. Also, the paper presents 1,000 plans for each of the states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, using the 2018 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics on these plans and the computations involved in their creation. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7485828 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-74858282020-09-21 Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation Haas, Christian Hachadoorian, Lee Kimbrough, Steven O. Miller, Peter Murphy, Frederic PLoS One Research Article Political redistricting is the redrawing of electoral district boundaries. It is normally undertaken to reflect population changes. The process can be abused, in what is called gerrymandering, to favor one party or interest group over another, resulting thereby in broadly undemocratic outcomes that misrepresent the views of the voters. Gerrymandering is especially vexing in the United States. This paper introduces an algorithm, with an implementation, for creating districting plans (whether for political redistricting or for other districting applications). The algorithm, Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair (SFSR), is demonstrated for Congressional redistricting in American states. SFSR is able to create thousands of valid redistricting plans, which may then be used as points of departure for public deliberation regarding how best to redistrict a given polity. The main objectives of this paper are: (i) to present SFSR in a broadly accessible form, including code that implements it and test data, so that it may be used for both civic deliberations by the public and for research purposes. (ii) to make the case for what SFSR essays to do, which is to approach redistricting, and districting generally, from a constraint satisfaction perspective and from the perspective of producing a plurality of feasible solutions that may then serve in subsequent deliberations. To further these goals, we make the code publicly available. The paper presents, for illustration purposes, a corpus of 11,206 valid redistricting plans for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (produced by SFSR), using the 2017 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics. Also, the paper presents 1,000 plans for each of the states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, using the 2018 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics on these plans and the computations involved in their creation. Public Library of Science 2020-09-11 /pmc/articles/PMC7485828/ /pubmed/32915791 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237935 Text en © 2020 Haas et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Haas, Christian Hachadoorian, Lee Kimbrough, Steven O. Miller, Peter Murphy, Frederic Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
title | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
title_full | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
title_fullStr | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
title_full_unstemmed | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
title_short | Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
title_sort | seed-fill-shift-repair: a redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7485828/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32915791 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237935 |
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