How Baseball Teaches Us The Best Way to Elect the President
Alan Natapoff
Wed Jan 17, 04-05:30pm, 37-212
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Single session event
Paradox: The Electoral College is more democratic than raw popular voting: It delivers massive power to individual voters in closely-contested states, but raw voting delivers none anywhere. Improvement: Base a state's Electoral vote count on its total popular vote, not its population. It would empower 80 million voters in poorly-contested states where the opposition could punish a despised dominant candidate by casting blank ballots. It would force candidates to earn the acquiescence of the opposition and to campaign beyond battleground states. In Iraq having many closely-contested districts would make the result sensitive to small numbers of defections - and, thereby, more democratic. We trace the paradoxes, the delicious oddities, and the resulution of Florida's deadlock in 2000 by Fermat's Rule.
Web: http://natapoff@mit.edu
Contact: Alan Natapoff, 37-219, x3-7757, natapoff@space.mit.edu
Sponsor: Political Science
Latest update: 22-Nov-2006
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