[EM] Interesting use of Borda count

[Steve Barney]

Forest:

I suggest asking Doanld Saari about this.

	"Donald Saari" <dsaari at uci.edu>
	http://www.math.nwu.edu/~d_saari/


Some of his voting theory books are used as textbooks, especially _Geometry of
Voting_, _Basic Geometry of Voting_, and perhaps the more recent _Decisions and
Elections_. _Chaotic Elections_ was written for and published by the American
Mathematical Society. It's not a textbook, but it requires some math to be able
to thoroughly follow and comprehend it. It covers much the same topics, in
greater depth without as many numbers, as the first 4 chapters of Tannenbaum
and Arnold's textbook. It relates math to liberal arts, political science and
economics.

Ironically, perhaps part of the problem is that the math department, or liberal
arts department, is using something like the plurality method to decide on
which textbooks to use. A better method, perhaps the Borda Count, might yield a
better result. Such departmental decision making is a frequent theme in Saari
books.

Steve Barney

> Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 16:04:27 -0800 (PST)
> From: Forest Simmons <fsimmons at pcc.edu>
> To: Election_Methods-list <election-methods-list at eskimo.com>
> Subject: Re: [EM] Interesting use of Borda count
> 
[...]
> 
> I tried to get Portland Community College (Portland, Oregon, where I
> teach) to adopt this text or a similar one for the liberal arts math
> course.  Instead they opted for teaching standard topics from algebra to
> the liberal arts students. 
> 
> Texts with voting methods in them are never used outside liberal arts
> courses at the undergraduate college level, so most students in most
> majors never have a chance of seeing them. 
> 
> When the college doesn't even adopt these texts for liberal arts math,
> then nobody in the whole college gets any exposure. 
> 
> Forest


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