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Williams College to Get a Look at New Voting Method "Majority Judgement"09:11AM / Wednesday, October 01, 2008
WILLIAMSTOWN - The results of an election experiment run at Williams College and "The Failure of the United States Electoral System" will be discussed at a free public lecture on Monday, Oct. 6. The lecture is scheduled for 7 p.m. in The Science Center's Wege Auditorium.
Reacting to a growing concern that traditional electoral systems do not necessarily designate the candidates who truly represent the will of the electorates, Michel Balinski '54 of the Ecole Polytechnique and CNRS, Paris, is arguing for a new method of voting, "Majority Judgment."
"With today's electoral system a minority can elect a president (and has)," he says. "A tiny percentage of the population elects half of the members of the Senate, a minority of the electorate can elect a majority in the House of Representatives (an probably has), and the apportionment of Representatives to States is biased."
There is a system of electing one candidate among several - the "Majority Judgment" - that permits voters to express their opinions by evaluating all the candidates, and picks the one that is really designated by the majority of the voters.
In his lecture, Balinski will discuss the Majority Judgment for ranking all candidates and electing one and the results of the experimental vote in the Williams College community.
Students were asked to complete a simple survey to evaluate presidential candidates using "easy, common words, such as 'Excellent,' 'Very Good,' 'Good,' 'Acceptable,' 'Poor,' and 'Reject.'"
Balinski argues that in this way, voters could give their absolute opinions about all candidates, not rank them or choose just one. The final grade of each candidate is the median of all his/her "grades."
Balinski is the director of the Laboratory of Econometrics at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and co-founder and co-director of "Optimization, games and modeling in economics" at the University of Paris.
He has taught mathematics and economics at Yale University and the Scientific and Medical University in Grenoble. Balinski is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Operations Research Society of America, and the Mathematical Programming Society. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Williams College and his Ph. D. in mathematics from Princeton University. |
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