Spanning Trees and Redistricting: New Methods for Sampling and Validation

Understand

Deciding whether a political districting plan was distorted by a hidden agenda, or whether it dilutes the voting power of some group, requires a neutral baseline for comparison.

• Remarkably, all nine U.S.
• Supreme Court justices have now signed on to decisions that find that computational methods can provide key evidence.
• Today, the leading approaches for benchmarking districting plans are based on the use of spanning trees for sampling graph partitions.