Communities of interest

Moon Duchin is new to Cornell, based in the Math Department and the Brooks School of Public Policy. She runs a lab that applies tools of data science to democratic mechanisms, especially redistricting and voting rules. 

Attend this talk via ZOOM

Talk: Communities of interest

Abstract: In the world of political redistricting, many states have a rule on the books that the lines should take "communities of interest" into account. But what in the world does this mean? Both the problem of identifying salient communities and the problem of what it means to "respect" or "reflect" them are wildly hard and interesting challenges that combine geography, sociology, natural language processing, and theories of political representation. I'll set the stage theoretically and then tell some tales from the trenches about what it looks like to take this districting principle seriously.