TITLE:
Blockchain Based Redistricting with Public Participation
AUTHORS:
Mahalingam Ramkumar, Naresh Adhikari
KEYWORDS:
Redistricting, Authenticated Data Structures, Blockchain Ledger
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Information Security,
Vol.13 No.3,
July
11,
2022
ABSTRACT: Redistricting
is the process of grouping all census blocks within a region to form larger subdivisions,
or districts. The process is typically subject to some hard rules and some
(soft) preferences to improve fairness of the solution. Achieving public
consensus on the fairness of proposed redistricting plans is highly desirable.
Unfortunately, fair redistricting is an NP
hard optimization problem. The complexity of the process makes it even more
challenging to convince the public of the fairness of the proposed solution.
This paper proposes a completely transparent blockchain based strategy to promote
public participation in the redistricting process, to increase public
confidence in the outcome of the process. The proposed approach is based on the
fact that one does not have to worry about how the NP hard problem was solved,
as long as it is possible for anyone to compute a “goodness” metric for the
proposed plan. In the proposed approach, anyone can submit a plan along with
the expected metric. Only the plan with the best claimed metric needs to be
evaluated in a blockchain network.