Political Districting to Minimize County Splits

2024/10/30 by Maral Shahmizad, Austin Buchanan · 6 citations
Engineering · Mathematics · Social Sciences · #Business #Computer science #Economics #ICT Impact and Policies #Law #Local Government Finance and Decentralization #Mathematics #Operations management #Operations research #Political science #Politics #Smart Parking Systems Research

paper · doi:10.1287/opre.2023.0094

published in Operations Research 73(2), 752-774 (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences)

openalex publication_date 2024/10/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

Political Districting to Minimize County Splits When dividing a state into districts for elections, one traditional criterion is that political subdivisions like counties and cities should not be divided unnecessarily. Some states go as far as to say that the number of county splits should be minimized, but previously there was no scalable exact method for determining this. With new integer programming techniques, Shahmizad and Buchanan exactly compute this minimum number for all states and district types (congressional, state senate, state house) across the USA.

Citations

• Nonpartisan Political Redistricting by Computer
• Formulations and valid inequalities for the node capacitated graph partitioning problem
• Multiobjective Optimization for Politically Fair Districting: A Scalable Multilevel Approach

Cited by

• Ballot Design and Electoral Outcomes: The Role of Candidate Order and Party Affiliation

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