An Exact Solution Method for the Political Districting Problem

Mehrotra, Johnson, and Nemhauser (1998) [Management Science 44, pp. 1100–1114] addressed a problem for political districting and developed an optimization based heuristic to find good districting plans which partition the population units into contiguous districts with equal populations. Their case...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inParallel processing letters Vol. 33; no. 1n02
Main Authors Chopra, Sunil, Park, Hyunwoo, Shim, Sangho
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Singapore World Scientific Publishing Company 01.03.2023
World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte., Ltd
Subjects
Exact solutions
Integer programming
Litigation
Optimization
relational gerrymander score
Political districting
gerrymandering
integer programming
optimization
city planning
management science of democracy
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ISSN0129-6264
1793-642X
DOI10.1142/S0129626423400017

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Summary:Mehrotra, Johnson, and Nemhauser (1998) [Management Science 44, pp. 1100–1114] addressed a problem for political districting and developed an optimization based heuristic to find good districting plans which partition the population units into contiguous districts with equal populations. Their case study found a good South Carolina plan at a penalty cost of 68. This paper develops a strong integer programming model identifying the exact optimal solution. Our model identifies the optimal South Carolina plan at the minimum penalty of 64. Motivated by the 2019 lawsuit challenging the congressional plan as gerrymandering, we inspect the actual Maryland plan.
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ISSN:0129-6264
1793-642X
DOI:10.1142/S0129626423400017