[EM] Kathy Dopp Papers

[Fred Gohlke]

Some may wish to note that the Social Science Research Network has 
released two election related papers by Kathy Dopp:

A Single Compactness Measure for Legislative Redistricting, May 31, 2011

Abstract:
Legislative districts in the 50 states are being redrawn following the 
completion of the 2010 United States census. Thirty-five states require 
that districts are compact, which is believed to make gerrymandering – 
designing legislative districts so as to advantage one political party – 
more difficult. There are now more than a dozen proposed competing 
numerical measures of the relative compactness of legislative districts. 
This article demonstrates that nine of the proposed measures of 
compactness do not reliably measure compactness. Pictorial 
counterexamples show that these nine proposed measures of area 
compactness assign the exact same value to shapes having visually 
distinct compactness levels. Next, this paper mathematically proves that 
all area-to-perimeter or area to square-of-perimeter measures (or their 
reciprocals or square roots) rank the compactness of any two sets of 
redistricting plans in the exact same order. Thus, these reliable 
proposed measures of district compactness are equivalent to the simplest 
such measure defined as the ratio of area to the square of the 
perimeter. An index of compactness is conceptually and computationally 
best when it has a maximum value of one (1) when the area is as compact 
as a circle, a minimum value approaching zero when the area’s perimeter 
is very large compared to its area, and provides a direct comparison of 
any two districts’ compactness regardless of district area size. This 
compactness measure is 4π times the ratio of the area of the district to 
the square-of-its-perimeter, known in mathematics as the isoperimetric 
quotient. This paper concludes by briefly setting the general context 
within which a compactness measure is applied to compare proposed 
district plans meeting other crucial considerations.


Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting Flaws and Benefits of IRV, June 5, 2011

Abstract:
After the United States' 2000 Presidential election, in which Ralph 
Nader’s candidacy caused G.W.Bush to win rather than Al Gore, a Maryland 
nonprofit organization led a movement to adopt the instant runoff voting 
(IRV) method of counting rank choice ballots. IRV was proposed to solve 
the spoiler effect in the case where a minor third candidate siphons off 
enough votes to cause the winner of an election to be the second most 
popular candidate. Presidential elections in 1844, 1848, 1884, 1912, and 
2000 were likely not won by the most popular candidate. However, instant 
runoff voting does not have much academic support. This paper examines a 
list of IRV’s flaws and benefits, and concludes that IRV threatens the 
fairness, accuracy, timeliness, and economy of U.S. elections. Scholars 
have proposed several other alternative electoral methods that preserve 
existing voter rights and improve upon the plurality method. What 
features should we look for in an alternative electoral method?