Operations Research and Political Districting

By now, we are all familiar with the practice of gerrymandering in which those in power draw districts that favor themselves or their party. Gerrymandering remains as prevalent as ever and has featured in some of the biggest cases before the US Supreme Court in recent years, including Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), Allen v. Milligan (2023), and Louisiana v. Callais (pending). In these and other cases, the tradeoffs between districting criteria become forefront. In this talk, we will see quantitative tools and techniques from operations research that can shed light on these important questions. These advanced analytical methods can be used to identify when districting criteria are (or are not) in conflict with each other, and by how much one criterion must be sacrificed to improve the others. The answers can (i) assist independent redistricting commissions and special masters in the delicate balancing of the many important districting criteria, (ii) enable disadvantaged groups to find alternatives (“demonstration districts”) that outperform proposed or enacted gerrymanders on the relevant legal criteria, (iii) educate districting experts to real (rather than imagined) tradeoffs so that court cases may proceed on truth. 

Dr. Austin Buchanan is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in Industrial Engineering & Management at Oklahoma State University and holds a PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Texas A&M University. His research focuses on solving optimization problems in networks, particularly those having connectivity or distance constraints, with applications in political districting. He is funded by NSF (including an NSF CAREER award) and AFOSR. His group has published in Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Mathematical Programming Computation, INFORMS Journal on Computing, and Election Law Journal, among others, winning the Harvey J. Greenberg Research Award from the INFORMS Computing Society and the Best Paper Award from the INFORMS Section on Telecommunications and Network Analytics. Dr. Buchanan serves on the editorial boards of Networks and Optimization Letters. He is a Senior Member of INFORMS and has held various leadership roles within INFORMS, most recently serving on the board of the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS), as CoChair of the INFORMS New Faculty Colloquium, and Chair for the ICS Student Paper Award.