HW 30: Citizen Journalist

I attended a lecture through the Keene State College Citizenship Symposium in which the lecture was an unexpected topic however, it was an interesting topic, it was on the voting systems in the world. Dr. Vincent Ferleni gave us our lecture on voting this Tuesday in the Redfern Art Center, his lecture was called Get the Vote Out and proceeded to inform all of us in his audience of the history, basics and details of voting. Dr. Ferleni got his Bachelors degree from Notre Dame in mathematics as well as his Masters degree in mathematics from the University of Oregon; he currently is a professor here at Keene State College. His talk began with a short history about voting, it began in Greece around 509 BEC where the voters would vote for who they liked the least. Once that vote was tallied the person like the least was put in to exile for ten or more years, the voters broken pot was called ostraca which is the root word for ostracize which we use today. The next piece of history of voting is the how the simple voting method works, which is that there are only two candidates and in the end one winner, however in the event of a tie there is a coin toss. In the U.S, this has occurred in Groveland, Florida during the city council elections and the winner was determined through the simple shout out of heads or tails, this is the most interesting aspect of voting that I gathered from this lecture. He then described the four different voting systems, the first being the plurality method where the winner is determined by the most number one voted candidate wins. The next originated by Jean Charles de Borda called the Borda method in which the highest number determines the candidate winner received after tallying votes. The third voting method is the Plurality with elimination method where majority chooses the winner. This is when our lecturer said, “We tend to like majority rules.” The last method is called the Pair wise comparison method, the winner is determined through the highest number of wins in elections. The last thing he discussed was fairness conditions in which there are three. The first being the majority criterion, the second is the Condorcet condition named after its founder and lastly the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion. This lecture was severely informative and lengthy in detail of the mathematics behind it, which was originated by Kenneth Arrow in 1921.