Partisan unfairness is easily detected when the statewide vote is equally divided between two parties. But when the vote is not evenly divided, even the determination of which party is disfavored becomes controversial. This paper examines the ideal fair outcome in a two party single member district system when the statewide vote is not equally divided. It is shown that equal voter empowerment, ...

I am an Associate professor in the department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, where I have been a member of the faculty since 2013. I received my Ph.D. in Mathematics from Rutgers University in 2010 under the supervision of József Beck, and I am an expert on stochastic processes and discrete probability. My research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Sl...

This paper examines how education policy generates residential sorting and changes residential land price inequality within a city. In 1974, Seoul shifted away from an exam based high school admission system, created high school districts and randomly allocated students to schools within each district. I examine how residential land prices change across school districts using a first difference...

Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems are a service that provides acute care and transportation to a place for definitive care, to people experiencing a medical emergency. The ultimate goal of EMS systems is to save lives. The ability of EMS systems to do this effectively is impacted by several resource allocation decisions including location of servers (ambulances), districting of demand zon...

There is currently no widely accepted standard method to determine whether gerrymandering has occurred. To a cutoff for unreasonable gerrymandering, simulating collections of districting plans in the absence partisan bias been proposed. In simulation-based methods, real-world election outcomes are compared results from simulated plans. Here, simulation that creates possible districts continuous...

This paper develops an approach to studying how bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of electoral districting a¤ects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of electoral bias to the theory of party competition and show how this a¤ects party strategy in theory. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated using data on local government in England. The results suggest that reducin...

Three developments have created challenges for political representation in the U.S. and particularly for the use of territorially based representation (election by district). First, the demographic complexity of the U.S. population has grown both in absolute terms and in terms of residential patterns. Second, legal developments since the 1960s have recognized an increasing number of groups as e...

Voting systems in which voters are partitioned to districts encourage accountability by providing voters an easily identifiable district representative, but can result in a selection of representatives not representative of the electorate’s preferences. In some cases, a party may have a majority of the popular vote, but lose the elections due to districting effects. We define the Misrepresentat...