Iowa Political Redistricting

In 2022, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld a Republican-drawn map that a lower court blocked because of partisan gerrymandering and diluting the minority vote by splitting Wyandotte County - home to Kansas City – into districts 2 and 3 for the first time in 40 years. Despite a request from voters in Kansas who claimed gerrymandering of congressional districts, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2023. Motivated by the recent gerrymandering case in Kansas, we employ modeling and programming tools and techniques of Operations Research to propose a redistricted map of Kansas that minimizes cut edges from the original map to the new proposed solution.