3 papers
cs.SI2026
A Cycle Walk for Sampling Measures on Spanning Forests for Redistricting
Daryl R. DeFord, Gregory Herschlag, Jonathan C. Mattingly
We introduce the Cycle Walk, a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method for sampling distributions on balanced graph partitions, motivated by applications in political redistricting. Th…
cs.CY2026
Redistricting from the Bottom Up: Sampling Communities of Interest with Differential Privacy
Atticus McWhorter, Caroline Hammond, Nianqiao Phyllis Ju +1
Independent Redistricting Commissions (IRCs) are a promising tool for bottom-up redistricting, but their public testimony processes are vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. We p…
cs.CY2025
Bounds and Bugs: The Limits of Symmetry Metrics to Detect Partisan Gerrymandering
Daryl DeFord, Ellen Veomett
We consider two symmetry metrics commonly used to analyze partisan gerrymandering: the Mean-Median Difference (MM) and Partisan Bias (PB). Our main results compare, for combination…