MATH EXPERTS JOIN EFFORT TO TACKLE GERRYMANDERING

MASS.» Some of the MEDFORD, brightest minds in math recently arrived at Tufts University to tackle an issue lawyers and political scientists have been struggling with for decades.

They came from colleges across the country for a weeklong conference on gerrymandering, the practice of crafting voting districts in a way that favors voters from a certain political party or demographic. It’s a topic of growing interest among many math and data experts who say their scholarly fields can provide new tools to help courts identify voting maps that are drawn unfairly.

Mathematicians hope to help by offering new measurements to evaluate whether a district has been drawn unfairly. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created a supercomputer algorithm that can compare a district to millions of hypothetical alternatives to determine whether the original map is a statistical outlier, which can offer evidence of bias. Teams at the University of Michigan and Duke University have developed similar algorithms.

Other quantitative methods that have gained traction include the “efficiency gap” formula, which measures to what extent a political party benefited from district boundaries in a particular election.

Some of the updated approaches helped convince a federal court in Wisconsin last year that the state’s voting districts amounted to illegal partisan gerrymandering, and legal experts say the swarm of new data tools could reshape how cases are decided.