A redistricting plan proposed by Republican legislators in Wisconsin in 2011 was overturned by a lower court based in part on the magnitude of the efficiency gap, although this ruling was overturned in 2018 by the US Supreme Court in Gill v. Whitford. In oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed this metric as “sociological gobbledygook.” Roberts’ critique is unfair in substance because the efficiency gap is a mathematical formula, not nonsense. But it is not entirely wrong in spirit. Some mathematicians have argued that these metrics do not accurately reflect “common-sense understanding of political unfairness.”
3 Matching Annotations
- May 2026
-
-
- Apr 2025
-
-
5 takeaways from Tuesday's elections, including bad news for Elon Musk by [[Domenico Montanaro]]
-
- Jul 2020
-
www.nber.org www.nber.org
-
Cotti, C. D., Engelhardt, B., Foster, J., Nesson, E. T., & Niekamp, P. S. (2020). The Relationship between In-Person Voting and COVID-19: Evidence from the Wisconsin Primary (Working Paper No. 27187; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27187
-