Title
Antimander: open source detection of gerrymandering though multi-objective evolutionary algorithms
Abstract
Redrawing congressional district boundaries for political advantage (i.e. gerrymandering) is a recognized problem in the United States. Legal cases opposing gerrymandering have been stymied by the lack of objective measures showing that a districting is unnecessarily biased relative to other viable designs, given a set of competing considerations (such as fairness, compactness, and competitiveness). As a result, there is interest in methods that can show that a candidate districting's fairness could be significantly improved without sacrificing any other considerations. We propose multi-objective evolutionary algorithms as a promising approach for identifying gerrymandering, and districting as a real-world benchmark for the field. Our contributions are (1) to design an encoding and operators appropriate to the problem, and explore enhancements such as novelty search and feasible-infeasible search, (2) to set baseline results, and (3) to release an open-source tool called Antimander, with the hope of inspiring future research aimed at solving an important political problem.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3377929.3398156
GECCO '20: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Cancún Mexico July, 2020
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-7127-8
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Joel Simon100.34
Joel Lehman2404.81