Ensembles of random legislative districts are a valuable tool for assessing whether a proposed district plan is an outlier or gerrymander. Expert witnesses have presented these in litigation using various methods, and unsurprisingly, they often disagree. Recent open source methods now permit independent validation of expert witness testimony. Here, we compare ensembles for the Pennsylvania House and Congressional districts calculated using "Redist" and "Gerrychain" further incorporating constraints restricting county and municipal boundary splitting, as required by Pennsylvania for legal plans. We compare results to expert witness testimony submitted by Republican and Democratic parties. We confirm some of the testimony but could not reproduce all of it, struggling with metrics based on a heuristic "sum of votes index" rathern than a straightforward average of metrics across multiple elections. We recommend against relying on analytics based on summing votes from multiple elections to create vote incides and derivative metrics as these are inherently poorly behaved. To promote transparency, we recommend that where possible, expert witness testimony be based solely on publicly available election data as opposed to proprietary data closely held by political parties.
翻译:随机立法区的集合是评估拟议地区计划是否是例外或例外的宝贵工具。 专家证人在诉讼中使用各种方法提出这些证据,而且不令人惊讶的是,他们往往不同意。 最近的开放源码方法现在允许对专家证人证词进行独立鉴定。 这里,我们比较宾夕法尼亚州议会和国会区集合,按照宾夕法尼亚州法律计划的要求,用“红色”和“吉里链”进一步纳入限制县和市分界的限制。 我们比较了结果与共和党和民主党提交的专家证人证词。 我们确认了一些证词,但不能全部复制这些证词,在多个选举中采用基于超常“票数总和”的衡量标准,而不是直截了当的衡量标准。 我们建议不要依赖基于多次选举的票缩写分析方法来创造投票结果和衍生指标,因为这些指标本来就行为不良。 为了提高透明度,我们建议专家证人证词尽可能完全以公开可得的选举数据为基础,而不是以政党密切掌握的专有数据为基础。