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Colorado in context: Congressional redistricting and competing fairness criteria in Colorado

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Abstract

In this paper, we apply techniques of ensemble analysis to understand the political baseline for Congressional representation in Colorado. We generate a large random sample of reasonable redistricting plans and determine the partisan balance of each district using returns from state-wide elections in 2018, and analyze the 2011/2012 enacted districts in this context. Colorado recently adopted a new framework for redistricting, creating an independent commission to draw district boundaries, prohibiting partisan bias and incumbency considerations, requiring that political boundaries (such as counties) be preserved as much as possible, and also requiring that mapmakers maximize the number of competitive districts. We investigate the relationships between partisan outcomes, number of counties which are split, and number of competitive districts in a plan. This paper also features two novel improvements in methodology—a more rigorous statistical framework for understanding necessary sample size, and a weighted-graph method for generating random plans which split approximately as few counties as acceptable human-drawn maps.

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Notes

  1. We note that [12] also examines Colorado’s current legal definition of competitiveness, that is, “having a reasonable potential for the party affiliation of the district’s representative to change at least once between federal decennial censuses” [4] using probability, and finds that a literal reading of this law might be that “any district in which both parties have at least a 13% projected chance of winning might match the Colorado law, since (1–0.13)\(^5 \approx 0.5\)” [12].

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the MGGG Redistricting Lab for introducing us to this area and for copious assistance; University of Nebraska graduate student Austin Eide for invaluable assistance in getting started; Todd Bleess of the Colorado State Demography Office for a great starting map; Geographers Dr. Rebecca Theobald and Dwayne Liller; student researchers Edgar Santos Vega, Jose Monge Castro, and Kadin Mangalik; and generous Colorado College GIS experts Matt Cooney and Francis Russell.

Funding

J. Clelland was partially supported by a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians from the Simons Foundation. H. Colgate was supported by the Colorado College Summer Collaborative Research Experience. D. DeFord was partially supported by a Prof. Amar G. Bose Research Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Jeanne Clelland

  2. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Haley Colgate

  3. Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

    Daryl DeFord

  4. Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO, USA

    Beth Malmskog & Flavia Sancier-Barbosa

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  1. Jeanne Clelland
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  2. Haley Colgate
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Correspondence to Jeanne Clelland.

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Clelland, J., Colgate, H., DeFord, D. et al. Colorado in context: Congressional redistricting and competing fairness criteria in Colorado. J Comput Soc Sc 5, 189–226 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-021-00119-7

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