2. Can regression help protect voting rights? This example is adapted from FAPP author Lawrence Lesser’s work as a statistician for the Texas Legislative Council. To comply with the Voting Rights Act, a state cannot redraw its districts in a way that dilutes the voting strength of a protected group. Because we cannot know how individuals voted, we cannot directly measure if minority and majority persons tend to prefer different candidates. Although there are technical details and assumptions we cannot fully discuss here, you can begin to understand how voting preference might be estimated by exploring the following dataset for nine equal-sized districts, where is the percentage of voters who are Hispanic and is the percentage of voters that voted for the candidate preferred by most Hispanics:

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