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arXiv · 1805.08208

Measuring Congressional District Meandering

Eion Blanchard·Kevin Knudson
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Abstract

In recent decades, state legislatures have often drawn U.S. Congressional voting districts that look---to the human eye---to be rather twisted. In this paper, we propose a method to measure how much districts "meander" via a computation of the medial axis of the region. We then compare this to the medial axis of the convex hull of the district to obtain the {\em medial-hull ratio}: a dimensionless quantity that captures the district's irregularity. We compute this quantity for many example Congressional districts.

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Eion Blanchard, Kevin Knudson. 2018-05-20. Measuring Congressional District Meandering. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.08208

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