Reports

• Election Reform in Lowell, MA

  MGGG

  21 October 2019

  Two years ago, the City of Lowell was sued because its system of election was said to prevent minority communities from being represented in city government. For example, even though there are 9 members of the City Council—and nearly half of Lowell’s population is Asian or Hispanic—there have only been 2 people of color elected to the City Council in 20 years!

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  Study of Reform Proposals for Chicago City Council

  MGGG

  15 April 2019

  Many observers agree that the Chicago City Council ward system suffers from problems of gerrymandering, intense segregation, vestiges of machine politics, and inefficiency. In our latest report, we apply mathematical models to analyze Chicago’s current ward plan and compare several reform proposals to address its problems. Our findings strongly support a transition to multimember wards with ranked choice voting to secure and sustain fair representation.

• The Mathematicians' Brief in Rucho v. Common Cause

  MGGG

  18 March 2019

  MGGG has organized a collaborative effort of mathematical and legal experts to file an amicus brief for the upcoming Supreme Court gerrymandering cases. An amicus brief is a “friend of the court” filing, where outside parties try to help supply the court with useful information.

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  Comparison of Districting Plans for the Virginia House of Delegates

  MGGG

  25 November 2018

  At the time of writing, Virginia is in the process of replacing its House of Delegates districting plan after eleven of the districts were ruled unconstitutional by a District Court in June 2018. This report presents a large ensemble of alternative valid districting plans, which we propose to use as a baseline for comparison in the evaluation of newly proposed plans. Our method highlights and quantifies the dilutive effects of packing Black Voting Age Population. This is a novel application to racial gerrymandering of industry-standard techniques from statistics and computational science.

  November 2018.

• Study of voting systems for Santa Clara, CA

  MGGG

  01 February 2018

  An MGGG white paper on recommended remedies for a challenged at-large City Council voting scheme.

• Outlier analysis for Pennsylvania

  Moon Duchin

  01 February 2018

  Expert report for LWV v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. (Typos corrected from court filing.)

  February 2018.