Will the best candidate win?

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Activities in this lesson allow students to explore alternative voting methods. Students discover what advantages and disadvantages each method offers and also see that each fails, in some way, to satisfy some desirable properties. Illuminations provides handouts and instructions for completing the interdisciplinary activity. After students participate in a series of voting activities, they evaluate the multiple types of the plurality method and strategic voting. Then, the teacher leads students in a discussion of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and the process of presidential primaries.

Students will:

• See connections between mathematics and other disciplines such as government, history, ethics, and sports.
• Develop skills in mathematical reasoning and apply those skills to everyday situations.
• Learn about various voting methods, ways in which these methods can be manipulated to achieve certain outcomes, and the impossibility of fair elections when more than two alternatives are available.

NCTM Standards and Expectations:

• Compare and contrast the properties of numbers and number systems, including the rational and real numbers, and understand complex numbers as solutions to quadratic equations that do not have real solutions.
• Use number-theory arguments to justify relationships involving whole numbers.
• Develop a deeper understanding of very large and very small numbers and of various representations of them.

North Carolina Curriculum Alignment