Abstract

RINCON GARCIA, Eric  and  GUTIERREZ ANDRADE, Miguel Ángel. Compacidad en celdas aplicada al diseño de zonas electorales. EconoQuantum [online]. 2009, vol.5, n.2, pp.73-96. ISSN 2007-9869.

The design of electoral zones is a complex problem which aims at ensuring democracy through the application of conditions such as population balance, contiguity and compactness. This paper proposes a new measure of compactness, which uses a mesh formed with square cells to measure the quality of the electoral zones. For this, we chose a real case whose topographical settings cause some traditional measures of compactness to give very poor quality results. Due to the computational complexity of the problem, an algorithm was designed based on simulated annealing. The results show that the new measure favors the creation of high quality zones with straight forms and avoids dispersed or twisted figures while having a minor effect in the population balance.

Keywords : Regionalización; distritación electoral; representación ciudadana; geografía electoral; elecciones; gerrymandering; optimización.

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