Graduation Year
2022
Date of Submission
4-2022
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Mathematics
Reader 1
Sarah Cannon
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2022 Vedika Vishweshwar
Abstract
Identifying extreme outliers in large state spaces is a difficult prob-
lem. I consider this problem in the context of finding political district-
ing plans that maximize the number of districts in which the majority
of the population is from a minority group, such as African Americans.
Since the set of all possible districting plans is enormous and unfeasi-
ble to examine in practice, this paper proposes a sampling method to
find these outlying plans. Specifically, this paper experiments with short
bursts in the context of minority voting rights in Georgia. Short bursts
are a type of Markov Chain in which an unbiased random walk is per-
formed for a small number of steps, and is then restarted from the plan
with the most majority-minority districts. This paper shows that short
bursts successfully find outlying legislative house, legislative senate, and
congressional plans.
Recommended Citation
Vishweshwar, Vedika, "Using Short Bursts to Optimize Redistricting in Georgia" (2022). CMC Senior Theses. 2990.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2990
