How Baseball, Poker, and Fermat Teach Us the Best Way to Elect the President
Alan Natapoff
Wed Jan 19, 04-05:30pm, 37-212
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Single session event
The great paradox of presidential voting is that the Electoral College is democratic, and simple popular voting is not: The Electoral College delivers massive voting power to individual voters in closely-contested states, but raw voting delivers none, anywhere. The Electoral College's only major vice is that it gives individual voters in poorly-contested states (i.e., 80 million or more out of 100 million in 2000)no power at all. The cure is to base a state's Electoral vote count on the actual number of popular votes it cast--not on its population. That would force candidates to campaign beyond the battleground states. We trace the paradoxes, the delicious oddities, and Fermat's solution to the problem of Florida 2000.
Web: http://natapoff@space.mit.edu
Contact: Alan Natapoff, 37-219, 253-7757, natapoff@space.mit.edu
Sponsor: Alan Natapoff, 37-147, 617 253-7757, natapoff@space.mit.edu
Latest update: 22-Oct-2004
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