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- Up one level
- Federal Court Rejects North Carolina Legislative Districts
Associated Press, NY Times, Aug 11, 2016 Federal judges struck down nearly 30 North Carolina House and Senate districts on Thursday as illegal racial gerrymanders, but will allow General Assembly elections to be held using them this fall.
- Quantifying gerrymandering
As a part of the Data+ program at the Information Initiative at Duke, we devised a diagnostic tool to quantify the effect of gerrymandering on congressional elections across a handful of states. Using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method (Metropolis-Hastings algorithm), we produce possible districtings that take into account the following: population division among districts; compactness; division of counties and the percentage of minority voters. We tally the votes for these sample districtings and compare the outcomes and competitiveness of these fictional congressional districts with those from the actual districts. This project is an extension to an earlier study by Christy Vaughn and Jonathan Mattingly on gerrymandering in North Carolina.
- Supreme Court hears cases about use of race in redistricting
Mark Sherman, Associated Press, Dec. 3, 2016 The Supreme Court is returning to the familiar intersection of race and politics, in a pair of cases examining redistricting in North Carolina and Virginia. The eight-justice court is hearing arguments Monday in two cases that deal with the same basic issue of whether race played too large a role in the drawing of electoral districts, to the detriment of African-Americans.
- The State of Things - Nonpartisan Partnership Offers Redistricting Suggestions (5 min)
Laura Lee & Frank Stasio, WUNC The State of Things, Aug. 30, 2016 The partnership between Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy and the nonprofit organization Common Cause presented a new map of the state's districts to demonstrate that lines could be drawn without regard to voting history or party registration. Host Frank Stasio talks with Terry Sanford Distinguished Fellow Tom Ross who led the panel.
- This is the best explanation of gerrymandering you will ever see
Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post, March 1, 2015 In 2012, Democrats won 51 percent of the popular House vote. But the only won 5 out of 18 House seats -- fewer than one third. This was because when Pennsylvania Republicans redrew the state's Congressional districts, they made highly irregular districts that look like the one below, PA-7, one of the most geographically irregular districts in the nation.