Redistricting occurs every 10 years following the decennial census. Ideally, the resulting districts are created to provide fair representation for each citizen. In the current system, however, the redistricting process has been open to manipulation. Although the process will always involve partisan and interested parties, a free and widely accessible computational tool that provides access to all relevant data and enables users to explore the universe of possible redistricting plans would make the process more transparent and would engage a broader array of citizens. Such a tool could also provide a forum for state representatives and decision-makers to use when discussing and negotiating redistricting plans. The long-term goal is to allow for the consideration of multiple objectives and parameter weights when evaluating redistricting plans; plans can be compared based on all these criteria. As a small exploratory grant with a one year life, the work will be limited to the formulation of the redistricting problem as a discrete optimization problem, which is essential to further progress on the broader project.
Intellectual Merit
The results of this research will provide a quantitative tool for comparing, evaluating, and creating redistricting plans intended to optimize specified criteria. In this mathematical formulation, powerful tools from computational complexity theory and discrete optimization can be adapted to identify previously unseen or ignored insights into the redistricting process and to identify gerrymanders; these goals would be infeasible otherwise. A cross-disciplinary team will be brought to bear, including a political scientist, a computer scientist, and a mathematician.
Broader Impact
In the long term, a cyberenvironment developed for redistricting will have a significant impact on public policy, research, and education. In public policy, there is the potential to fundamentally transform the redistricting process by providing a widely accessible objective tool to open the redistricting process to participation by a broader and more diverse group of interested stakeholders. Such a cyberenvironment will have a clear educational impact, as K?12 students will be able to visualize the redistricting process, providing them with a richer understanding of democracy and allowing them to approach social science in the context of computation.
