David Shmoys and Wes Gurnee ’20 share new research on ranked choice voting as a hedge against the influence of gerrymandering. Gurnee, a Cornell CS graduate now earning a Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is the Executive Director of Fairmandering. cs.cornell.edu/information/ne…

New paper! "Combatting Gerrymandering with Social Choice: the Design of Multi-member Districts" w/ Wes Gurnee ( Fairmandering ), David Rothschild 🌻, & David Shmoys We show that a simple (radical) change would combat both intentional and "natural" gerrymanders arxiv.org/abs/2107.07083

Wes Gurnee and David Shmoys describe the Fairmandering project—which frames #political redistricting as a #computational problem in order to help avoid #gerrymandering and optimize fairness—on the SIAM News blog. Check it out! sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/f…

My take on Michigan's and Ohio's new partisan fairness requirements for redistricting. In short, MI's provision is working (because it's being implemented by an independent commission) and OH's provision is failing (because it's entrusted to politicians). electionlawblog.org/?p=125240

Dear Chief Justice Roberts, you did this. Sincerely, the Whitford and Rucho plaintiffs.

Wes Gurnee (Fairmandering) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s OR Center will talk at Bucknell University about optimizing the fairness of electoral districts. He won the 2020 INFORMS Undergrad #orms Prize for that! When: November 11, 1:30 PM EST Where: Hislop Auditorium @ Holmes Zoom: bucknell.zoom.us/j/98013548150?…

The FiveThirtyEight redistricting tracker is such a great product this cycle projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-…

We've added precinct-level election data CSVs for all states to our public repository github.com/dra2020/vtd_da…. Cheers!

This is a nice clear way to understand votes/seats differentials that can be produced by gerrymandering. Happily Michigan now has a Citizens' Commission drawing districts, so hopefully the imbalance won't continue into this decade.

It's going to be a year of ridiculous takes on the midterms They'll be interpreted as a referendum on critical race theory, masks in schools, the price of gas, or SCOTUS and abortion In reality, winners & losers are being determined right now through partisan gerrymandering

Not unexpected, but huge setback for GOP. Dems have potential to net 2-3 more seats out of a revised map.

Research by Cornell University confirms that #RankedChoiceVoting in multi-member Congressional districts stops the worst of gerrymandering. You can read the study here: arxiv.org/abs/2107.07083

The four biggest remaining redistricting unknowns: - How aggressive is the NY Dem map? - Does PA Supreme Court intervene vs. a GOP-friendly map? - Do GOP maps in NC/OH get replaced by more neutral plans? - Does SCOTUS greenlight a second Black seat in AL (and maybe LA/SC)?

The ALARM Project is proud to announce the new 50-State Simulation Project from Cory McCartan, Christopher T. Kenny, PhD, Tyler Simko, Shiro Kuriwaki, George Garcia III, Kevin Wang, Melissa Wu, and Kosuke Imai! Dive into our results at alarm-redist.github.io/fifty-states/

Our redistricting process is so broken that we've already seen several courts overturn Congressional maps this cycle. It doesn't have to be this way. #RankedChoiceVoting in multi-member districts mitigates gerrymandering, as this Cornell University study shows: bit.ly/3FRmbR5

Our own Professor David Shmoys will be a featured speaker at the TEDxCornell 2022 Conference in just 12 days! #TEDxCornell Tickets: cornelltickets.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?i…

Looking for a way to end America's gerrymandering crisis? Cornell University research finds that proportional #RankedChoiceVoting reduces it dramatically. arxiv.org/abs/2107.07083

If you are interested in other applications of discrete optimization (not just redistricting) consider following my new twitter account!

The amount of land mass represented by House Democrats just went up by 104%. #AKAL

I'm excited to announce pygris, a new #Python package to help you work with U.S. Census Bureau geographic datasets (and other resources)! Read the docs: walker-data.com/pygris/ Try out pygris on Colab: colab.research.google.com/drive/1HplgI2J… Source code: github.com/walkerke/pygris #pydata #gischat