Compactness statistics for spanning tree recombination

Abstract

Ensemble analysis has become an important tool for quantifying gerrymandering; the main idea is to generate a large, random sample of districting plans (an "ensemble") to which any proposed plan may be compared. If a proposed plan is an extreme outlier compared to the ensemble with regard to various redistricting criteria, this may indicate that the plan was deliberately engineered to produce a specific outcome. Many methods have been used to construct ensembles, and a fundamental question that arises is: Given a method for constructing plans, can we identify a probability distribution on the space of plans that describes the probability of constructing any particular plan by that method? Recently, MCMC methods have become a predominant tool for constructing ensembles. Here we focus on the MCMC method known as "ReCom," which was introduced in 2018 by the MGGG Redistricting Lab. ReCom tends to produce plans with more compact districts than some other methods, and we sought to better understand this phenomenon. We adopted a discrete analog of district perimeter called "cut edges" as a quantitative measure for district compactness; this measure was proposed by Duchin and Tenner, and it avoids some of the difficulties associated with compactness measures based on geographic perimeter, such as the Polsby-Popper score. To model the basic ReCom step, we constructed ensembles of 2-district plans for two grid graphs and for the precinct graph of Boulder County, CO. We found that the probability of sampling any particular plan -- which is roughly proportional to the product of the numbers of spanning trees for each of the two districts -- is also approximately proportional to an exponentially decaying function of the number of cut edges in the plan. This is an important step towards understanding compactness properties for districting plans produced by the ReCom method.