UK Boundaries

The Lab was approached by the UK Boundary Commission, the body resposible for redistricting in the UK, to help them understand some of the tradeoffs made by prioritizing the preservation of particular municipal boundaries. While the report focuses on England, the methods may be applied to other parts of the UK. Read the report here. Simple runs of the leading districting algorithms employed here show that it is possible to modestly improve on boundary alignment in the construction of electoral constituencies in England. With a bit more time and tuning, we would expect to find more significant improvements.