Politics:
How math is used to evaluate districts to ensure all votes count
In 2018, there have been several court cases where a group of voters have claimed they have been disenfranchised–that their vote didn’t count.
Click to read…
These cases are mostly brought by Democrats, who received a larger portion of the vote in a state, but placed fewer members in Congress or the state legislatures. This article (Nature, June 8, 2017) explains how math can be used to evaluate “fairness”, using objective measures that are easy to understand (e.g. such as comparing perimeters and areas of districts).
Activity: Use the internet to find details on these cases (choose one or more) and answer these questions:
1. How many “seats” were voted on?
2. Compare the party vote to the total vote, and calculate percentage of votes.
3. Compare the number of seats won to the total seats, and calculate the percentage of seats.
4. Discuss your sources (very important) and the results. As an example, here is a good article on the national level: Brookings Institute article on misrepresentation in Congress.
Here are pages 2 & 3 of the article from Nature, June 8th, 2017
Click for part 2.
Click for part 3.