Before I started my PhD, I was an active contributor to GerryChain, a Python library that uses Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to build ensembles of political districting plans. In particular, I worked on fine-tuning local search techniques, and added county and municipality awareness to our Markov chains. GerryChain has been used extensively in recent legal cases concerning partisan and racial gerrymandering. In particular, it was used in Allen v. Milligan, where the Supreme Court struck down Alabama’s Congressional districting plan for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Developed in collaboration with Dr. Karin C. Knudson and Dr. Amy Becker, PyEI is a Python package for ecological inference and ecological regression. We developed this tool with two goals in mind:
In conjunction with GerryChain, PyEI has been used in several legal cases after the 2020 redistricting cycle, including Allen v. Milligan.