Search All of the Math Forum:
Views expressed in these public forums are not endorsed by
Drexel University or The Math Forum.
|
|
|
|
Re: Borda count
Posted:
Nov 16, 2000 9:33 PM
|
|
Right! It was Don Saari's article that I read. I unfortunately lent it
to a colleague, who hasn't returned it, and I didn't bookmark it. Now I
can give him credit for the idea.
Thanks, Eric.
Guy
Eric Hart wrote:
>
> At 9:04 PM -0500 11/11/00, Guy Brandenburg wrote:
> >Because of the tremendous interest by my students in the recent
> >presidential election, I decided on Thursday to scrap the
> >previously-planned lesson and instead to do a lesson on voting theory.
>
> Guy's post gets at an issue that may be more fundamental than vote counting
> or the electoral college, namely, the actual voting method we use. He
> mentions that his students concluded that the plurality method, which we
> typically use to elect our government officials, is the worst of the
> methods they investigated (for elections where there are more than two
> candidates). Many mathematicians agree! Two of the most prominent
> researchers in this area are Don Saari of the University of California at
> Irvine, who favors the Borda count method, and Steven Brams of New York
> University, who favors approval voting.
>
> An interesting article on this appeared in the November issue of Discover:
> http://discover.com/nov_00/gthere.html?article=featbestman.html
> A high school lesson on voting from the Mathematics Teacher is posted at:
> http://illuminations.nctm.org/lessonplans/9-12/vote/index.html
>
> Eric
>
> >Guy Brandenburg
> >
> >My souces for this lesson were, more or less, the COMAP book For All
> >Practical purposes, which is an interesting source of ideas; columns I
> >had read a long time ago in Scientific American by Martin Gardner and I
> >suspect others on Kenneth Arrow's apparent proof that the only type of
> >election procedure that actually follows a few apparently simple axioms
> >is a dictatorship; and a much more recent article on voting theory by a
> >person whose name I cannot recall right now because I forgot to bookmark
> >it and instead simply printed out and took to school. He contradicts
> >Arrow. I will attempt to find this citation on Monday.
> >
> >GFB
|
|
|
|
