Republican candidates often receive between 30% and 40% of the two-way vote share in statewide elections in Massachusetts. For the last three Census cycles, MA has held 9-10 seats in the House of Representatives, which means that a district can be won with as little as 6% of the statewide vote. Putting these two facts together, one may be surprised to learn that a Massachusetts Republican has not won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1994. We argue that the underperformance of Republicans in Massachusetts is not attributable to gerrymandering, nor to the failure of Republicans to field House candidates, but is a structural mathematical feature of the distribution of votes. For several of the elections studied here, there are more ways of building a valid districting plan than there are particles in the galaxy, and every one of them will produce a 9-0 Democratic delegation. arXiv:1810.09051v1 [physics.soc-ph]

Let G be a nonempty simple graph with a vertex set V (G) and an edge set E(G). For every injective vertex labeling f : V (G) → Z, there are two induced edge labelings, namelyThe sum index and the difference index are the minimum cardinalities of the ranges of f + and f − , respectively. We provide upper and lower bounds on the sum index and difference index, and determine the sum index and difference index of various families of graphs. We also provide an interesting conjecture relating the sum index and the difference index of graphs.

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