Date of Award
January 2019
Degree Type
Open Access Thesis
Document Type
Master Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Mathematics and Statistics
First Advisor
Lisa Whitis Kay
Department Affiliation
Mathematics and Statistics
Second Advisor
Shane P. Redmond
Department Affiliation
Mathematics and Statistics
Third Advisor
Michelle L. Smith
Department Affiliation
Mathematics and Statistics
Abstract
Partisan gerrymandering has been and will continue to be a topic of interest in the coming years. States will soon begin their redistricting process following the 2020 Census. We introduce a method of simulating Congressional elections which provides a new way of examining and visualizing the votes-to-seats relationship for a state Congressional map using past election data. We are able to build upon Mira Bernstein's method of uniformly simulating elections by injecting a data-driven component of variation into the simulations. Additionally, we are able to directly evaluate the accuracy of our simulations using a type of cross-validation. We compare our results from a handful of notable states to other measures of partisan gerrymandering, such as the efficiency gap, and do so in light of recent court cases and other important contexts.
Copyright
Copyright 2019 Zachary James Morgan
Recommended Citation
Morgan, Zachary James, "Examining Partisan Advantage In Congressional Maps Using Simulations Based On Election Data" (2019). Online Theses and Dissertations. 578.
https://encompass.eku.edu/etd/578
