Redistricting and the Will of the People

Understand

We introduce a non-partisan probability distribution on congressional redistricting of North Carolina which emphasizes the equal partition of the population and the compactness of districts.

• When random districts are drawn and the results of the 2012 election were re-tabulated under the drawn districtings, we find that an average of 7.6 democratic representatives are elected.
• 95% of the randomly sampled redistrictings produced between 6 and 9 Democrats.
• Both of these facts are in stark contrast with the 4 Democrats elected in the 2012 elections with the same vote counts.