A System for Political Districting in the State of Mexico

Districting is the redrawing of the boundaries of legislative districts for electoral purposes in such a way that the Federal or state requirements, such as contiguity, population equality, and compactness, are fulfilled. The resulting optimization problem involves the former requirement as a hard constraint while the other two are considered as conflicting objective functions. The solution technique used for many years by the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute was an algorithm based on Simulated Annealing. In this article, we present the system proposed for the electoral districting process in the state of Mexico. This system included, a geographic tool to visualize and edit districting plans, and for first time in Mexico, the use of an Artificial Bee Colony based algorithm that automatically creates redistricting plans.