Video: "Gerrymandering - Why It's More Complicated Than Most People Think"

Video: "Gerrymandering - Why It's More Complicated Than Most People Think"

Scales of Justice
Type: 
News

Mira Bernstein’s talk on at the September 28, 2017 Opening Meeting of the LWV of Wellesley is now available on video!  Many thanks go to James Joyce of Wellesley Public Media who filmed the presentation and to Mira Bernstein who gave us her time and expertise in a very interesting and informative talk.

 (Video courtesy of Wellesley Media)

Mira BernsteinMira Bernstein holds a research faculty position in the interdisciplinary program Science, Technology and Society at Tufts University where she is a founding member of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG), which believes that gerrymandering is a fundamental threat to our democracy. Mira studied mathematics at Yale and was a Churchill Scholar at Cambridge, after which she received her doctorate from Harvard in algebraic gometry. She coordinated a research team from Harvard, MIT, the National Bureau of Economic Research and Portland, Oregon to assess the effects of extending health insurance to a low-income uninsured population, during which time she developed novel sampling framework and statistical weighting procedures. She was also the director of a summer program for mathematically-talented high school students for over 15 years.

With the Supreme Court preparing to hear oral arguments on October 3, 2017 in Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to the redistricting plan passed by Wisconsin's legislature in 2011, this talk is an extremely relevant look at how voting is affected by gerrymandering. For more information about this important case, which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has called perhaps the most important of the upcoming term, click here.

The New Yorker also had an interesting recent piece about a new MGGG summer symposium at Tufts aimed at bringing together people with expertise in the legal, historical, civil rights, and mathematical aspects of redistricting.

League to which this content belongs: 
Wellesley