Utility Ghost: Gamified redistricting with partisan symmetry

TL;DR

This paper introduces Utility Ghost, a gamified redistricting protocol that promotes partisan fairness by balancing seat allocation and reducing first-player advantage through strategic turn-taking.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel gamified protocol for bipartisan redistricting that ensures fairness and minimizes partisan bias in both idealized and realistic scenarios.

Findings

In an ideal setting, both parties win equal seats with optimal play.

The protocol nearly eliminates first-player advantage in realistic settings.

The approach promotes partisan symmetry in redistricting.

Abstract

Inspired by the word game Ghost, we propose a new protocol for bipartisan redistricting in which partisan players take turns assigning precincts to districts. We prove that in an idealized setting, if both parties have the same number votes, then under optimal play in our protocol, both parties win the same number of seats. We also evaluate our protocol in more realistic settings that show how our game nearly eliminates the first-player advantage exhibited in other redistricting protocols.