Date of Submission
Spring 2018
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Mathematics
Project Advisor 1
Ethan Bloch
Abstract/Artist's Statement
Voting district boundaries are often manipulated, or gerrymandered, by politicians in order to give one group of voters an unfair advantage over another during elections. To make sure a system of voting districts is not gerrymandered, the population size, the shape, and the voting efficiency of each party in each district should be taken into consideration. Following recent work of Boris Alexeev and Dustin G. Mixon, we discuss mathematical criteria for each of these three aspects, and we prove how problems arise when attempting to apply all three at once to a districting system--first to a simplified districting system and then to a more realistic districting system.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Degutz, Danielle, "Gerrymandering and the Impossibility of Fair Districting Systems" (2018). Senior Projects Spring 2019. 179.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2019/179
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
Included in
American Politics Commons, Models and Methods Commons, Other Applied Mathematics Commons, Other Political Science Commons, Political Theory Commons