Political Thicket, Mathematical Quagmire: How voting is and is not a math problem

There are many structural questions about voting that sound like mathematics, if you're a mathematician.  One of the thorniest is about how to think about the choices and consequences involved in redistricting.  I'll describe a front-row look at the math, the politics, and the law in collision, as we wait on yet another Supreme Court gerrymandering decision.

Moon Duchin is Associate Professor of Mathematics and Senior Fellow in the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University.  Her mathematical specialties are geometric group theory, geometric topology, and dynamics.  For the last few years, she has been working on mathematical and computational interventions in redistricting.  In 2018, she was the consulting expert for Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf in that state's court-mandated redistricting process. This year, she organized a brief by mathematicians and law scholars for the Supreme Court in their North Carolina gerrymandering case.