Newsweek Notes Relevance of Mathematics to Voting

January 30, 2008

Newsweek.com has reported that there are instances "When math warps elections." One candidate, it said, could win with some rules and lose with others. These are two of the themes of this year's Mathematics Awareness Month.

Writing on January 27, Newsweek's science writer Sharon Begley had visited the JPBM site mathaware.org to test the interaction between mathematics and elections. Three different voting methods, she found, produced two different winners. "For anyone who believes in democracy," concluded Begley, this is a little disturbing."

What it means, said mathematician Donald Saari (University of California, Irvine), is that "election outcomes can more accurately reflect the choice of an election rule than the voters' wishes." Moreover, Saari and other mathematicians have found that some voting systems can result in a so-called winner who does not reflect a plurality of the voters, let alone a majority.

"The severity of the problem escalates with the number of candidates," noted Saari, especially in a four-way race.

Source: Newsweek