Redistricting: Designing the election battlefield

Few topics generate more debate than elections. But long before voters head to the polls, important decisions have already been made about how communities are grouped into districts and how representation is structured.

While redistricting is often discussed as a political issue, it’s also a fascinating operations research problem – one involving competing objectives and complex constraints such as geography, population, representation, and legal requirements, as well as competing definitions of fairness.

My guest today, Ian Ludden, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, will share how computational methods and OR/MS are helping researchers evaluate district maps and better understand the choices that shape our democracy.

We’ll explore questions of fairness, representation, and how data-driven approaches can help us better understand one of the most consequential – and often controversial – processes in American democracy.

Going back to 1812, redistricting already started to have some partisan bias in it, with Massachusetts case, where the governor Elbridge Jerry approved a map that was had a sort of salamander-shaped district that was called the gerrymander in a political cartoon, and the name stuck. And those district lines affect how well different communities are able to voice their concerns, both at the state and federal levels. And it has ripple effects on public health, environmental health, local economic development, education, and all sorts of other public policy decisions. And recently we've had you know this mid-decade redistricting push – which is a little unusual – driven by parties trying to consolidate power before the midterm elections, and has been compounded by the recent Supreme Court case in Louisiana. I remember learning about gerrymandering in school and then as an adult seeing an actual salamander and thinking, that's kind of a stretch, but I get what they were going for. Yeah, exactly. Political cartoons are often a stretch.

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