Nonparametric Detection of Gerrymandering in Multiparty Plurality Elections

Nonparametric Detection of Gerrymandering in Multiparty Plurality Elections

Dariusz Stolicki, Wojciech Słomczyński, Stanisław Szufa

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2967-2975. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/329

Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan gerrymandering are narrowly tailored toward fully contested two-party elections, and fail if there are more parties or if the number of candidates per district varies. We propose a new method, applying nonparametric statistical learning to detect anomalies in the relation between (aggregate) votes and (aggregate) seats. Unlike in most of the existing methods, we propose to learn the standard of fairness in districting from empirical data rather than assume one a priori. Finally, we test the proposed methods against experimental data as well as real-life data from 17 countries employing the plurality (FPTP) system.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Social sciences