IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jss/jstsof/v042i04.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

BARD: Better Automated Redistricting

Author

Listed:
  • Altman, Micah
  • McDonald, Michael P.

Abstract

BARD is the first (and at time of writing, only) open source software package for general redistricting and redistricting analysis. BARD provides methods to create, display, compare, edit, automatically refine, evaluate, and profile political districting plans. BARD aims to provide a framework for scientific analysis of redistricting plans and to facilitate wider public participation in the creation of new plans. BARD facilitates map creation and refinement through command-line, graphical user interface, and automatic methods. Since redistricting is a computationally complex partitioning problem not amenable to an exact optimization solution, BARD implements a variety of selectable metaheuristics that can be used to refine existing or randomly-generated redistricting plans based on user-determined criteria. Furthermore, BARD supports automated generation of redistricting plans and profiling of plans by assigning different weights to various criteria, such as district compactness or equality of population. This functionality permits exploration of trade-offs among criteria. The intent of a redistricting authority may be explored by examining these trade-offs and inferring which reasonably observable plans were not adopted. Redistricting is a computationally-intensive problem for even modest-sized states. Performance is thus an important consideration in BARD's design and implementation. The program implements performance enhancements such as evaluation caching, explicit memory management, and distributed computing across snow clusters.

Suggested Citation

  • Altman, Micah & McDonald, Michael P., 2011. "BARD: Better Automated Redistricting," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 42(i04).
  • Handle: RePEc:jss:jstsof:v:042:i04
    DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/10.18637/jss.v042.i04
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php/jss/article/view/v042i04/v42i04.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php/jss/article/downloadSuppFile/v042i04/BARD_1.22.tar.gz
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php/jss/article/downloadSuppFile/v042i04/v42i04.R
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/http://hdl.handle.net/10.18637/jss.v042.i04?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. D J Rossiter & R J Johnston, 1981. "Program GROUP: The Identification of All Possible Solutions to a Constituency-Delimitation Problem," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 13(2), pages 231-238, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Barry Burden & Corwin Smidt, 2020. "Evaluating Legislative Districts Using Measures of Partisan Bias and Simulations," SAGE Open, , vol. 10(4), pages 21582440209, December.
    2. Kyle Gatesman & James Unwin, 2018. "Lattice Studies of Gerrymandering Strategies," Papers 1808.02826, arXiv.org.
    3. Gopalan, Ram & Hachadoorian, Lee & Kimbrough, Steven O. & Murphy, Frederic H., 2024. "Selecting good redistricting plans from a large pool of available plans using the efficient frontier," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).
    4. Bivand, Roger, 2011. "Geocomputation and open source software: components and software stacks," Discussion Paper Series in Economics 23/2011, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. C R Margules & D P Faith & L Belbin, 1985. "An Adjacency Constraint in Agglomerative Hierarchical Classifications of Geographic Data," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 17(3), pages 397-412, March.
    2. Juan Carlos Duque & Raúl Ramos & Jordi Suriñach, 2007. "Supervised Regionalization Methods: A Survey," International Regional Science Review, , vol. 30(3), pages 195-220, July.
    3. D J Rossiter & R J Johnston & C J Pattie, 1992. "Redisricting London: The Issues and Likely Political Effects," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 24(9), pages 1221-1230, September.
    4. R J Johnston & S Openshaw & D W Rhind & D J Rossiter, 1984. "Spatial Scientists and Representational Democracy: The Role of Information-Processing Technology in the Design of Parliamentary and other Constituencies," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 2(1), pages 57-66, March.
    5. R.J. Johnston & D.J. Rossiter, 1981. "Shape and the Definition of Parliamentary Constituencies," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 18(2), pages 219-223, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jss:jstsof:v:042:i04. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.jstatsoft.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.