Independent Redistricting Commissions as a Solution for Partisan Gerrymandering — The Consent of the Governed Part 5// Listen to this as a podcast. Part I: The Nuclear Option On November 1, 2011, the Arizona State Senate voted 21–6 along party lines to remove Colleen Coyle Mathis from the state’s independent redistricting commission. Mathis had been the chairwoman and the sole independent member of the five-member…

Rucho v. Common Cause and the Future of Gerrymandering — The Consent of the Governed Part 4 // Listen to this as a podcast. Part I: Statistical Outlier Analysis Goes to Court In the most recent iteration of The Consent of the Governed, I talked about statistical outlier analysis and why I believe it to be the most effective measure to detect partisan gerrymanders and successfully take them…

Statistical Outlier Analysis and the Solution to Gerrymandering — The Consent of the Governed Part 3 // Listen to this as a podcast. Part I: Authoritarian States Thomas Hofeller, “the master of the modern gerrymander,” died in August 2018, leaving behind a trove of secret files, emails, studies, spreadsheets, and other documents relating to Republican gerrymanders and the Trump Administration’s 2019 attempt to…

The Efficiency Gap and a Solution to Gerrymandering — The Consent of the Governed Part 2 // Listen to this as a podcast. Part I: Breaking a Quorum In 2000, prior to the 2001 nationwide redistricting, the Texas congressional delegation was comprised of 18 Democrats and 12 Republicans, slightly favoring Democrats, who had received approximately the same 48% of the statewide House popular vote…

REDMAP and American Democracy — The Consent of the Governed Part 1 // Listen to this as a podcast. Part I: The Gerry-mander, REDMAP, and How to Win an Election Without Really Trying Gerrymandering is the process of redrawing a Congressional or state legislative map in order to advantage a political party or protect an incumbent politician from being removed from power. The Constitution mandates that there be a…

If you haven’t heard, we are currently living through a pandemic. The whole nation, as well as much of the world, is shut down, sheltering in place, and social distancing. …

How We Got Here And Where We’re Going — Part I: The Problem There has been a lot of bad news recently: the Coronavirus pandemic is sweeping the globe, the economy is in near-freefall, we are facing a cataclysmic climate crisis, and uncertainty and fear are in abundance. I have felt this anxiety, more so in recent weeks than ever before. It feels…

How the American College System Keeps Out the Smart, Poor Kid At Gettysburg College, as of this year, 22% of the first-year class received pell grants. …

I want to start with a lesson from Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History. In the episode entitled Burden of Proof, Gladwell borrows from a presentation he did at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013, in which he describes the story of Friedrich Hoffman. Hoffman was the senior statistician at the…