Redistricting from the Bottom Up: Sampling Communities of Interest with Differential Privacy (opens in new tab)

Independent Redistricting Commissions (IRCs) are a promising tool for bottom-up redistricting, but their public testimony processes are vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. We propose using differential privacy to draw redistricting plans that incorporate community of interest (COI) testimonies while remaining robust to adversarial input. Treating individual testimonies as data points, we use the marked edge walk to sample from differentially...