Voting: How it works and why it doesn't
Channel: Chris Staecker
Date: 2012-11-07

A talk I gave at the Fairfield University Math & Computer Science colloquium, November 6 (election day) 2012. There was no video recorded at the talk, but this is a screencast with live audio of the beamer slides I used.

Voting turns out to be more complicated that you'd think. I talked about various voting systems and criteria for judging fairness, and the fact that no possible voting system can satisfy even a small set of reasonable fairness conditions. In particular we discuss a weak form of Arrow's Theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem. Special attention is given to the fairness issues present in the plurality system, the basic voting system in the United States.

Chris Staecker's internet webarea: http://faculty.fairfield.edu/cstaecker/
Fairfield U. Math department webarea: http://www.fairfield.edu/cas/math_index.html