METHOD ENERGIES Christy Vaughn Sachet Bangia Bridget Dou

METHOD & ENERGIES Christy Vaughn Sachet Bangia Bridget Dou Sophie Guo The way we redraw districts (beginning with actual districting); we are using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulations for our distribution: 1. Propose a precinct on a district boundary to move into the neighboring district. 2. Accept or reject the change based on new vs. current district energies (see below) and the Metropolis Hastings Algorithm. 3. After many changes, re-tabulate election results using actual vote data The factors we consider for each district when redrawing plans: Compactness Energy ensures geographically compact districts. so this is better The populations of all districts are about equal and minority populations are in accordance with the Votings Rights Act of 1965. than this Minimize the number of split counties

RESULTS Projected Number of Democrats Elected to US House in NC, 2012 Distribution of Average Margin of Victories vs. Actual Average Margin of Victories, Based on 2012 House Data Our results on the left also so far seem to prefer bipartisan committees (IA) plans over those drawn solely by the state legislature (NC, MD). There is some evidence of bias in the redistricting process. Even in cases where the seats-split matched that of our randomly drawn samples, the margin of victories were often larger, as seen above. In addition, it is interesting to note the effect of the Majority-Minority Energy on the distribution of Demo-crats elected to office, as seen above.