Haiti Elections Archives 2005

50-plus-one-vote And Mathematical Ambiguity!!!

Home > Haiti Elections Archives 2005 Forum > Charles Henry Baker > 50-plus-one-vote and mathematical ambiguity!!!

i was thinking in class today about haitian politics which has lately become an obsession of mine when suddenly it occurred to me that the 50% -plus-one-vote concept carries in it a potential intrinsic absurdity.
how the legal framers of our constitution unwittingly created a arithmetic ambiguity?
in coming with the concept of 50%-plus-one-vote, the jurists may have considered the simplest sample of all, that is "one hundred" itselt.
if one were to partion 100 in order to find the "minimal" absolute majority, it would be 51. since we are dealing with the count of singular votes, only intergers can be considered.

so the main goal would be whoever gets more than 50% is the one with absolute majority.

so the "minimal" absolute majority for a sample of one hundred is 51, which also happens to be 50% plus one vote for that special sample of one hundred.
but one hundred is an even number, but if the sample is an odd number the concept of 50% plus one vote becomes nonsensical whereas that of equating abosolute majority with "more than 50%" will be consistent with both odd and even numbers.
for instance, if we have 204 votes cast, 103 would meet the criterion of 50%-plus-one-vote since "103" represents the 50% (102) plus "1"; however, if the number of votes cast is an odd number such as 203, the concept becomes nonsensical because 50% of that odd sample would not yield a whole number.

however, had the framers say " more than 50%", such ambiguity would have been avoided.

i am not refering here to the current situation, but rather to the high frequency of ambiguous semantics in our constitution.

in the case of "203" 101 would not meet the proposed criterion because it is 50% of 202 which is itself less than 203; but 102 would meet the criterion because it is more than 50% of 203 which is 101.5.
in conclusion, the framers of our constitution did not exactly write what they intended to ( which is supposed to have been that an absolute majority is obtained whenever one candidates has more than 50% of the vote) because they were misled by the apparent universality of the special sample considered, namely a sample of 100.
that happens even to professional mathematicians, one finds a special case or even many cases, then one makes an erroneous general conclusion; for those who are mathematically competent such as druno and jackotie, that happended to abel about his proposed solution of equations of fitfth degree.

Posted by Patriotic Sentinel on 2/14/06 10:21 PM

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