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Applying District Weights: Some Count More than Others

Districts may have different influence than others when determining the parameters of a system. To reflect this, we can assign a weight parameter to command judgeit :

• weight=constant (default) in which all districts have equal weight;

• weight=turnout, corresponding to the two-party votes cast in each district;

• weight=eligible.voters, corresponding to the total number of eligible voters in each district, or

• weight=seats, the number of seats in each district.

This will have two distinct impacts on the analysis. First, in the linear modelling, each district will have a variance equal to a constant ($\sigma^2$ ) times the specified weight. Second, the mean vote will be calculated with respect to this weight; a constant weight will yield the average district vote, while setting the weight according to turnout will yield the grand average or ``popular'' vote.