Elections are the engine that drives democracy. The central question of this dissertation relates to the speed of that engine: How long does it take for elections to reflect changing preferences in the electorate? The findings presented in this dissertation suggest that electoral change is the result of a gradual process of natural selection in which the political environment, rather than district service activity, is the key variable. Comparing elections data across different types of district environment, I find evidence that the environment affects levels of competition and electoral outcomes. Utilizing an event history statistical model to examine various risk factors for electoral defeat, I find that the political environment of the district is the most important factor influencing the risk of defeat even when controlling for district service behaviors. Over time, the district environment operates as a self-correcting mechanism, purging political misfits and replacing them with representatives who better reflect the ideology of the district. Electoral change typically results more from evolution than revolution – it may not occur quickly, and it may not occur in every district, but it does occur when and where it is needed.

傳統之選區劃分多採用人工方式進行，不但費時耗力，同時不容易維持公平公正之原則，導致客觀性受扭曲而產生爭議。歷史上透過選區劃分來操弄選舉最有名的例子首推美國麻州的傑利蠑螈劃分方式，因此後人在選區劃分時必須堅守公平客觀之原則，自動化之選區劃分應運而生。以電腦科技自動劃分選區不但省時省力，同時也能滿足公平公正等客觀的選區劃分要求。 過去我們提出了一系列的選區劃分方法，著重於產生大量的劃分解集合，並從中挑選形狀較佳之解，卻沒有考慮到維持鄉鎮市層級行政區之完整性。本論文中，我們提出了一套新的選區劃分方式，除了考慮鄉鎮市層級行政區之完整性外，同時考慮選取較佳之起始點，以獲得較佳之選區形狀，成功的劃分出良好的選區。 我們首先從挑選較佳之起始點，透過質心范諾圖的觀念劃分出形狀較完整之初始選區，然後修正各選區之人口至合理的誤差範圍內，再進行鄉鎮市層級行政區分割數之修正，以避免該層級行政區被過渡分割。由於行政區分割數修正可能影響並擴大人口誤差，為確保人口誤差維持在合理範圍內，我們進行第二次人口修正，以免人口誤差過大，隨後進行形狀調整以提高凸包面積比，最後再度進行鄉鎮市層級行政區分割數修正，儘量少分割鄉鎮市層級之行政區域。 實作中我們以台北市為例，採用四組不同的起始點進行選區劃分，結果都十分良好。我們將中選會公佈之劃分法與這四組結果進行比較，中選會的劃分方式在行政區分割數上比我們的結果好，但在人口誤差與形狀上都不及我們的劃分方式優異。另外我們也選取行政中心為起始點進行劃分並將結果與中選會的結果比較，也獲得相同的結論。至於選情預估方面，我們也證實了不同的選區劃分方式的確將造成選舉結果之改變。 / Traditionally, electoral redistricting was done manually which was time consumming, inefficient, and hard to maintain fairness. One of the most famous biased electoral redistricting in human history was proposed by Elbridge Gerry in 1812, socalled the Gerrymandering districting. After that, fairness and objectivity are required in every electoral redistricting and, hence, come to the era of automatic redistricting. We have proposed a series of automatic electoral redistricting mechanisms that were emphasized on producing huge amount of feasible solutions and selecting the right solutions from them. However, we did not consider avoiding over partitioning a county in the proposed mechanisms. In this thesis, we developed a new mechanism for electoral redistricting which not only avoiding the over partitioning problem but also start the redistricting by chosing a better set of seeds. Using a set of better seeds, we can get a better set of initial electoral districts through the help of centroidal Voronoi diagram. Then, we adjust the population in every district followed by reducing the partitioning number of each county. Since adjusting the county partitioning number may violate the population requirement of the districts, we shall check the population requirement of all the districts again before checking compactness of all the districts. Finally, we applied the county partitioning number reduction process once more to reduce the partitioning number as many as we can. In the experiments, we used Taipei city to verify our mechanism. Four set of seeds were used to generate different redistricting solutions. We compared our results with the result announced by the Central Election Commission (CEC) and found that CEC’s results has better average county partitioning number but worse population error as well as worse compactness. We also used the administrative districts’ center as the seeds to generate the fifth redistricting solutions and obtained the same conclusion, i. e., CEC’s results has better average county partitioning number but worse population error as well as worse compactness. We also demonstrated that different redistricting results may change the election outcomes.

In countries like the US, public school systems function through school districts, which are geographical areas where schools share the same administrative structure and are often coterminous with the boundary of a city or a county. School districts play an important role in the functioning of society. In a well-run school district with safe and well-functioning schools, graduating enough students can enhance the quality of life in its area. Conversely, a poorly run district may cause growth in the area to be far less than surrounding areas, or even a decline in population over time. To promote the efficient functioning of the school district, the boundaries of public schools are redrawn from time to time by the school board/planning officials. In the majority of the cases, this process of redrawing the school boundaries, also called school redistricting or school boundary formation, is done manually by the planners and involves hand-drawn maps. Given the rapid advancements in GIS made in the last decade and the availability of high-quality geospatial data, we opine that an objective treatment of the school redistricting problem by a data-driven model can assist the school board/ decision-makers by providing them with automated plans. These automated plans may serve as possible suggestions to the planners, who can adapt them to prepare their own plans in the way they see fit based on their subjective knowledge and expertise. In this dissertation, we propose algorithmic techniques for solving the problem of (school) redistricting, which is an NP-hard problem. We primarily investigate optimization-based algorithms for solving the problem. Our approaches include (i) clustering, (ii) local search, and (iii) memetic algorithms. We also propose ways of solving the problem using exact methods and fair redistricting techniques based on ethical considerations. The techniques developed here are generic enough to be applied to other redistricting problems with some degree of modification in the objective function and constraint-handling techniques. The source code and corresponding datasets are available at https://github.com/subhodipbiswas/schoolredistricting. / Doctor of Philosophy / In many countries, public school systems function through school districts, which are geographical areas where schools share the same administrative structure and are often coterminous with the boundary of a city or a county. To promote efficient functioning of the school district, the boundaries of public schools are redrawn from time to time by the school board/planning officials. In the majority of the cases, this process of redrawing the school boundaries, also called school redistricting, is done manually by the planners and involves hand-drawn maps. Given the rapid advancements in GIS made in the last decade and the availability of high-quality geospatial data, we opine that an objective treatment of the school redistricting problem by a data-driven model can assist the school board/ decision-makers by providing them with automated plans. In this presentation, we propose algorithmic techniques for solving the school redistricting problem. Our approaches include (i) clustering, (ii) local search, and (iii) memetic algorithms. We also show that MCMC-based techniques can aid in enabling exact methods to operate on this problem. Lastly, we briefly highlight ethical considerations involved in the process of school redistricting and throw light on some ways to devise more ethically-aware strategies for doing school redistricting. The results indicate that the proposed methods could be a valuable decision-making tool for school officials.

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En metod för närområdesindelning i Hälsovalet Gävleborgs skapas och beskrivs i detta arbete. Indelningen av närområdena bör vara objektiva och ta hänsyn till patientens bästa. Detta arbete syftar till att skapa alternativa indelningar av närområdena i Hälsovalet Gävleborg och det syftar även på att undersöka olika tillgänglighetsparametrars påverkan. Resultatet ska sedan kunna användas för att jämföras med dagens närområden som är inriktade mot vårdgivarna. Gävleborg är utsett som studieområde eftersom de tillämpar aktiv revidering av närområdena samt den ojämna fördelning av invånare i städerna och i glesbygden som kan bidra till att indelningarna av närområdena blir mer komplexa. I denna studie används två olika typer av nätverksanalys, kortaste vägen och ruttplanering. Referenssystemet som har använts är SWEREF99. De kommunala bussnäten integreras i analysen för att skapa nya områden ur ett patientperspektiv och stor vikt läggas på gångavstånd och tillgänglighet i kollektivtrafiken. Om invånarna i ett område inte har gångavstånd till hälsocentralen men har möjlighet att åka kommunalt till den ska de tilldelas denna hälsocentral istället. Om busstransport inte heller är möjligt ska invånarna tilldelas den hälsocentral de snabbast kan ta sig till med bil. Även Restiden är en parameter som tas upp i denna analys som ett kriterium för en rimlig bussresa. Ett eget Python-script tagits fram för att tilldela ett område till en hälsocentral där gångavstånd, avståndet till och från bussen samt restid med buss kan anpassas för att testa de olika parametrarnas påverkan. I detta arbete har sex olika alternativa lösningar till indelningen av närområdena i Gävleborg använts. Resultatet består av nya närområdesindelningar, transporttider och transportmedel. Metoden som använts i detta arbete är gjord för att kunna appliceras på flera olika områden i samhället, ett exempel på det kan vara i skolplaneringen. Då möjligheten finns att ändra parametrar i analysen för att få fram en anpassad indelning baserat på individers begränsningar kan detta lättare anpassas för att fylla flera funktioner. / A method for redistricting in Health Choice Gävleborg are created and described in this thesis. Redistricting of areas in Health Choice should be objective and take into account the patient's best interest. This work aim to create alternative redistricting in the Health Choice Gävleborg and it also aims to explore the impact of different accessibility parameters. The results will then be used to compare with today's districts that are focused on the caregivers. Gävleborg is designated as the study area because they apply active revision of the districts as well as the uneven distribution of population in the cities and rural areas that can contribute to the redistricting becomes more complex. In this study, two different types of network analysis are applied, shortest path and route planning. The reference system used is SWEREF99. The municipal bus networks are integrated into the analysis in order to create areas from a patient perspective and emphasis is placed on walking distance and the availability of public transport. If residents of an area is not within walking distance to the health center but they are able to use public transportation they will be assigned to this health center instead. If bus transportation is also not possible to the residents they will be assigned to the clinic most accessible by car. Also travel time is a parameter included in this analysis as a criterion for a reasonable bus ride. A separate Python script designed to assign an area to a health center where walking distance, the distance to and from the bus and travel time by bus can be adapted to test the various parameters. In this thesis six alternative solutions to the redistricting in Health Choice Gävleborg are formed. Result is the new redistricting, transportation time and means of transportation. The method used in this work is designed to be applied to many different areas of society; an example can be school redistricting. With a possibility to change parameters in the analysis to obtain a custom classification based on individual restrictions can easily be customized to fulfill several functions.

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No description available.

La révision des circonscriptions électorales consiste, dans le cadre des démocraties représentatives, à donner un ressort territorial à l’élection des membres des assemblées parlementaires. Loin de se réduire à une mesure neutre et purement administrative, comme en atteste l’histoire tourmentée des manœuvres électorales, cette opération entraîne de nombreuses conséquences sur la sincérité des résultats électoraux, les rapports de force entre partis politiques et la constitution des majorités gouvernementales ainsi que sur la représentation des intérêts, des idées et des valeurs. En lien avec l’évolution permanente des mentalités, les principes guidant la réalisation des découpages électoraux connaissent, dans la continuité de la mue séculaire des modes de gouvernement, une nouvelle métamorphose tendant à rapprocher gouvernants et gouvernés, en vue de répondre ultimement aux attentes des citoyens. Les circonscriptions électorales se trouvent ainsi amenées à devoir être en adéquation avec une vision plus ambitieuse de l’égalité de représentation, laquelle suppose non seulement une égalité devant le suffrage mais également une représentation effective et une délimitation des circonscriptions législatives soustraite aux pressions du pouvoir politique. Cette évolution, commune à plusieurs systèmes juridiques, ouvre la voie à une étude comparative centrée sur quatre pays aux traditions électorales différentes : Royaume-Uni, Canada, États-Unis et France. Au-delà des appréciations classiques, il sera ainsi possible, au carrefour du droit et de la politique, de faire ressortir les implications multiples que viennent induire ces mutations sur la consistance des circonscriptions électorales, sur la nature de la représentation politique et, finalement, sur l’affermissement et le renouvellement de la démocratie. / In the framework of representative democracies, the electoral redistricting aims to give jurisdiction to the election of members of parliamentary assemblies. Far from being a neutral and purely administrative measure, as evidenced by the tormented history of gerrymandering, this operation has many consequences on the fairness of election results, the balance of power between political parties, the formation of governmental majorities, and furthermore on the representation of interests, ideas, and values. In connection with the ongoing evolution of mentalities, the principles guiding the implementation of electoral constituencies are experiencing, in the continuity of secular change of government forms, a new metamorphosis tending to bring the people and the government closer together, so as to ultimately reach citizens’ expectations. Thus, electoral districts are expected to be in line with a more ambitious vision of equal representation, which requires not only voting equality but also effective representation and delimitation of parliamentary constituencies subtracted from pressures of political power. This trend, which is common to several legal systems, opens the way for a comparative study focused on four countries with different electoral traditions: the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States of America, and France. Beyond conventional opinions, it will be possible, at the intersection of law and politics, to bring out the many implications that these mutations induce on the consistency of electoral constituencies, on the nature of political representation and, ultimately, on the strengthening and renewal of democracy

Trust in information systems stem from two key properties of responses to queries regarding the state of the system, viz., i) authoritativeness, and ii) unbiasedness. That the response is authoritative implies that i) the provider (source) of the response, and ii) the chain of delegations through which the provider obtained the authority to respond, can be verified. The property of unbiasedness implies that no system data relevant to the query is deliberately or accidentally suppressed. The need for guaranteeing these two important properties stem from the impracticality for the verifier to exhaustively verify the correctness of every system process, and the integrity of the platform on which system processes are executed. For instance, the integrity of a process may be jeopardized by i) bugs (attacks) in computing hardware like Random Access Memory (RAM), input/output channels (I/O), and Central Processing Unit( CPU), ii) exploitable defects in an operating system, iii) logical bugs in program implementation, and iv) a wide range of other embedded malfunctions, among others. A first step in ensuing AU properties of geographic queries is the need to ensure AU responses to a specific type of geographic query, viz., point-location. The focus of this dissertation is on strategies to leverage assured point-location, for i) ensuring authoritativeness and unbiasedness (AU) of responses to a wide range of geographic queries; and ii) useful applications like Secure Queryable Dynamic Maps (SQDM) and trustworthy redistricting protocol. The specific strategies used for guaranteeing AU properties of geographic services include i) use of novel Merkle-hash tree- based data structures, and ii) blockchain networks to guarantee the integrity of the processes.

選舉是實行民主政治最有效的方法之一，而選區劃分的方式將直接或間接的影響投票結果與民主政治理念的施行。 然而在選舉法規或行政區域發生變動時，舊有的選區劃分方式需要隨之調整。而傳統人工的方式具有許多缺點，如：耗費人力資源、人口分配不均、難以兼顧形狀及行政區完整等等。若每次行政區域發生變動，都需要重新劃分，將花費許多不必要的人力、物力及時間，因此利用電腦以完成自動劃分的技術逐漸受到重視。 本論文中我們打破現有的政治與人文鴻溝，嘗試以系統化的方法對選區劃分作全面性的查驗。我們利用計算幾何學的特性與人工智慧搜尋的技巧，儘量找出可能的劃分方式再進行評估。我們依據中選會的建議採用村裡為劃分之最小行政區域，從數以十萬計之合理解中，根據形狀等客觀條件篩選出較佳之劃分方式，進而將歷史投票行為加入考量，以對篩選出的劃分方式作進一步評估與分析。 實作中我們以台南市為對象，在不同的人口限制及形狀條件下，分別比較所能找到的合理解數目。同時選出一部分的劃分方式，和中選會的劃分方式比較，結果顯示我們的方法可以全面性的分析選區劃分，不同的劃分方式可能產生不同的選舉結果。 / Election is one of the most effective way of conducting democratic politics, and mean of electoral redistricting shall post effect, either directly or indirectly, on electoral outcome as well as delivering ideas of democratic politics. As election regulations or administrational districts experience alterations, the present electoral districting is forcefully accompanied with adjustments. Electoral redistricting using traditional human labor works reveal several flaws such as: human resource wastage, uneven population distributions, hard to maintain shape contiguity and compactness, as well as the completeness of administration districts. Every single alteration experience in administration district requires redistribution, thus expensing on unnecessary human labor, resources and time. As such, it had brought great attention on techniques of automatic redistribution by means of modern computer technologies. In this thesis, we shall breakthrough a giant gap between politics and humanity; conduct a thorough examination on systematic approach on electoral redistricting. We are going to utilize characteristics of computational geometry and artificial intelligence searching techniques to find out every conceivable means of redistricting then evaluation the performance of them. By recommendation of Central Election Commission (hence CEM), we will adopt the classification of township as basic unit of administrational district, from counts of thousand adequate explanations, by objective factors of shape accordance and others, select the better means of redistricting methods, and afterward put into concern of historical voting behavior, conduct a further evaluation and analysis upon chosen redistricting method. In actual practices we had selected Tainan City as the experiment target, under different population limitations and factors of form, compare the searchable numbers of decent explanation respectively. We choose some redistricting outcomes, and put into comparison with redistricting method of the CEM. The results indicated our approach is able to conduct a thorough redistricting analysis, as well as more diversified comparing to CEM's outcome. The result of this experiment also reveals different election outcome with adoption of different redistricting methods.