In the Electioneering Project… students answer the questions “does my vote matter?” and “what is fair?” by analyzing how well their local congressional districts, and voting systems, represent the will of the people.

Academic skills & content: students learned various methods of measuring compactness, applying visual and spatial reasoning, geometric ratios and areas, and optimization to manipulate several variables while meeting real world constraints; voting criteria including Pareto, Monotonicity, and Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives; sequences and series in proportionality and the efficiency gap. Students studied voting theory, group theory, social choice theory, and topology.

Final products: all students create a poster explaining an existing voting system. In addition, students choose whether to develop and test their own new voting system, or to redraw congressional districts in order to make them more compact.

Suggested duration: 12 weeks