why elections aren't fair (and what we can do about it) /
First Statement of Responsibility
William Poundstone.
EDITION STATEMENT
Edition Statement
First edition.
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.
New York :
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Hill and Wang,
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2008.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
xii, 338 pages :
Other Physical Details
illustrations ;
Dimensions
24 cm
INTERNAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES/INDEXES NOTE
Text of Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [313]-324) and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
The problem. 1. Game theory -- Kurt Gödel -- Adolf Hitler -- Albert Einstein -- Oskar Morgenstern -- Bambi -- The U.S. Constitution -- Joseph Goebbels -- God -- Kaiser Wilhelm II -- John von Neumann -- Kenneth Arrow -- Marxism -- Alfred Tarski -- Intransitivity -- Harold Hotelling -- Ice cream -- John Hicks -- "Scissors, paper, stone" -- Duncan Black -- The "forty-seven-year old wife of a machinist living in Dayton, Ohio" -- The RAND Corporation -- Condoleezza Rice -- Olaf Helmer -- Harry Truman -- Joseph Stalin -- Abram Bergson -- 2. The big bang -- Michelle Kwan -- The great flip-flop -- Republicans -- Democrats -- Communists -- Sidney Morgenbesser -- Irrelevant alternatives -- Michelangelo -- Joe McCarthy -- Winston Churchill -- Woodrow Wilson -- Boss Tweed -- Amartya Sen -- 3. A shorty history of vote splitting -- Spoilers -- The electoral college -- James Polk -- Henry Clay -- James Birney -- Cholera -- Zachary Taylor -- Martin Van Buren -- Lewis Cass -- Abraham Lincoln -- Stephen Douglas -- John Breckinridge -- John Bell -- James Blaine -- Moral values -- Temperate Republican women -- Grover Cleveland -- John St. John -- Benjamin Harrison -- James Weaver -- J.P. Morgan -- Henry Clay Frick -- Teddy Roosevelt -- William Howard Taft -- Woodrow Wilson -- Eugene Debs -- Socialism -- Wall Street -- Ross Perot -- Larry King -- Nude photos -- George H.W. Bush -- Bill Clinton -- Bob Dole -- POWs -- Vietnamese -- Black Panthers -- Ed Rollins -- FDR -- Harry Levine -- Ralph Nader -- Hiroshima -- Al Gore -- Lewis Carroll -- Tweedledee -- Tweedledum -- George W. Bush -- Michael Moore -- John McCain -- Karl Rove -- Mother Teresa -- Universal negatives -- Tarek Milleron -- Cadillac tail fins -- George McGovern -- Gore Vidal -- Ronald Reagan -- The fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit -- Mother Jones -- James Carville -- "That bastard" -- The devil -- Pat Buchanan -- Harry Browne -- Harry Reid -- Defective consumer products -- 4. The most evil man in America -- Marcus Hanna -- William McKinley -- Yiddish -- JFK -- Richard Nixon -- Joseph Napolitan -- Lee Atwater -- Cannibalism -- Ladies' corsets -- Martin Van Buren -- The Ten Commandments -- Syphilis -- Slavery -- Mother murder -- Lyndon Johnson -- Farm animals -- Television -- Rush Limbaugh -- Arthur Finkelstein -- The $12 man -- Jesus -- Jews -- Push-polling -- Electroshock -- NAACP -- George W. Bush -- Jeb Bush -- Michael Dukakis -- Babe Ruth -- Willie Horton -- Al Gore -- Susan Estrich -- Mario Cuomo -- Heroin dealers -- Jennifer Fitzgerald -- Lithesome Republican women -- David Duke -- Death -- Apologies -- Peace -- Love -- Brotherhood -- The extra-chromosome crowd -- Thinking outside the box -- 5. Run, Ralph, run! -- Karl Rove -- The "red special" -- Samuel Gompers -- Greens -- The Texas "six-pack" -- Arno Political consultants -- Wal-Mart -- JSM -- Sproul and Associates -- The Las Vegas FBI office -- The Oregon Family Council -- Ayn Rand -- Lie detectors -- Captain America -- The "Ten Commandments judge" -- The National Guard -- Harold See -- Black holes -- Three men and a horse -- Barbra Streisand -- Bob Shrum -- 6. Year of the spoiler -- Randy "Duke" Cunningham -- Brian Billbray -- Francine Busby -- Tijuana sewage -- William Griffith -- Mysterious phone calls -- Feminazi educrats -- Tim Kaine -- Jerry Kilgore -- Rick Santorum -- Weapons of mass destruction -- Bob Casey Jr. -- A Republican in a duck suit -- Carl Romanelli -- Antimatter -- Eye gouging -- Nonviolence -- Insane Democrats -- Randy Graf -- "Gabby" Giffords -- Ken Mehlman -- Idiots -- Rick Perry -- Chris Bell -- Carole Strayhorn -- Kinky Friedman -- J. Edgar Hoover -- Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 -- Trail lawyers -- Ted Kulongoski -- Ron Saxton -- Mary Starrett -- Tweedledee, Tweedledum -- Pennies from heaven --
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The reality. 16. The way democracy will be -- Unhappiness -- The Center for Voting and Democracy -- Rob Richie -- George Hallett -- Cynthia Terrell -- Cincinnati -- John Anderson -- Lani Guinier -- Cumulative voting -- David Gergen -- George Soros -- The Muppets -- Alienation -- Howard Dean -- Barack Obama -- USA Today -- The Sierra Club -- Spirochetes -- Penicillin -- Jesse Jackson, Jr. -- The Prius of voting systems -- Heretics -- Zealots -- A one-word answer no one understands -- Regret in Peru -- A car with Kennedy and Nixon bumper stickers -- Minimal coalitions -- Third parties -- Nursery effect -- Moderates -- The universal political fantasy -- A mission from God -- 17. Blue man coup -- Karma -- George Allen -- YouTube -- Glenda Parker's vacation money -- The Blue Man from Bozeman -- Y2K -- The Heimlich maneuver -- Smurfs -- Little microchips inserted in our brains -- Conspiracy theories -- Glossary -- Addresses.
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The solution. 7. Trouble in Kiribati -- Benjamin Franklin -- The Marquis de Condorcet -- Thomas Paine -- Thomas Jefferson -- Louis XVI -- Marie Antoinette -- Robespierre -- Omelets -- Irony -- Jean-Charles de Borda -- The metric system -- Brokeback Mountain -- The most repulsive book ever written in the French language -- The Marquis de Laplace -- "Honest men" -- Corrupt sportswriters -- Arrogant pushy scientists -- Catalonian mysticism -- Sinners and infidels -- The most perfect voting method -- Kiribati -- James Madison -- Napoléon Bonaparte -- 8. The new Belfry -- Charles Dodgson -- Thrift -- Stuttering -- Henry George Liddell -- Bad architecture -- Blogging -- Committee voting -- Extraordinary injustice -- Uncut pages -- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Barking up the wrong Tumtum tree -- Unanswered prayers -- Paradoxes -- Dodos -- A trick picture -- 9. Instant runoff -- Edward Gorey -- The Good Samaritan -- William Robert Ware -- Sermons -- MIT -- John Stuart Mill -- The moral condition of the working classes -- Alexis de Tocqueville -- Proportional representation -- Thomas Hare -- Carl George Andrae -- Lord Salisbury -- H.G. Wells -- Instant-runoff voting -- One-stop shopping -- The winner-turns-loser paradox -- 10. Who's afraid of the big bad cycle? -- Robert Todd Lincoln -- The executive branch's Angel of Death -- Pullman porters -- Adman Clayton Powell, Jr. -- James Garfield -- Tammany Hall -- "The most un-American, most diabolical system ever devised" -- Mussolini -- Duverger's law -- Ilona Staller's left breast -- Bimini -- Dodgson's rule -- Dick Morris -- Bob Dole -- Newt Gingrich -- Jerry Falwell -- Lucifer -- William H. Riker -- Brown v. Board of Education -- Harry Truman -- Republican flip-floppers -- The Joseph McCarthy of Condorcet cycles -- Liberalism -- Wilmot proviso -- The Journal of Theoretical Politics -- Scott L. Feld -- Bernard Grofman -- Allan Gibbard -- Mark Satterthwaite -- Amartya Sen -- Con games -- 11. Buckley and the clones -- Steven Brams -- George Boehm -- George and Ira Gershwin -- Negative voting -- Robert J. Weber -- Nelson Rockefeller -- Charles Goodell -- William F. Buckley, Jr. -- James Buckley -- Richard Ottinger -- Clones -- Dummies -- Spiro Agnew -- Richard Nixon -- Ithaca -- Game theory -- Approval voting -- John Kellett -- Kenneth Mott -- Richard A. Morin -- Guy Ottewell -- Good guys -- Bad guys -- Nobel prizes -- The Serene Republic of Venice -- Popes -- The Soviet Union -- The United Nations -- Good Morning America -- The most dangerous system ever invented -- 12. Bad Santa -- Donald Saari -- Kris Kringle -- The n-body problem -- Rigged elections -- Peter Fishburn -- Samuel Merrill III -- Jill Van Newenhizen -- Indeterminacy -- Rebuttals and counter-rebuttals -- Unsophisticated voter system -- Unmitigated evil -- Symmetry -- Polyhedra -- Behavioral assumptions I find to be very dangerous -- Mr. Mediocre -- Thomas Edison -- Electrocuted dogs -- "President Perot" -- Alexander Tabarrok -- "Buddy" Roemer -- How to buy kitchen cabinets -- "Wherever you go, there you are" -- Polls -- Chameleon on a mirror -- Bandwagon effect -- Jesse Ventura -- Roger B. Myerson -- John Nash -- Self-interest -- Bullet voting -- Terry Sanford -- Air bags -- Burr's dilemma -- 13. Last man standing -- Orange County -- John Wayne -- American machismo -- The Condorcet winner -- Linux -- Markus Schulze -- CSSD -- Wikipedia -- Trolls -- Queen Elizabeth -- Kim Jong Il -- Sarcasm -- Simplicity -- Ka-Ping Yee -- Microsoft Windows -- Manipulative behavior -- How to prevent carjacking -- Mathematics Awareness Week -- Iain McLean -- Permanent pointlessness -- 14. Hot or not? -- Hanging out -- James Hong -- Jim Young -- Gene survival -- Speed dating -- Silicon Valley -- Slashdot -- Playboy -- Michelin ratings -- Range voting -- The Internet movie database -- The Seventh Seal -- Jennifer Aniston -- Cheating -- Warren D. Smith -- Bayesian regret -- Ignorance -- Honesty -- Guilt -- Quasi-spiritual acts -- Honeybees -- Jan Kok -- Number phobia -- Pop culture -- 15. Present but not voting -- This is Spinal Tap -- Jeremy Bentham -- Faulty embalming -- Lionel Robbins -- eBay -- Claude Hillinger -- Socialism -- John Harsanyi -- Fiddling while Rome burns -- What the impossibility theorem really means --
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
At least five U.S. presidential elections have been won by the second most popular candidate, because of "spoilers"--minor candidates who take enough votes away from the most popular candidate to tip the election. The spoiler effect is a consequence of the "impossibility theorem," discovered by Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow, which asserts that voting is fundamentally unfair--and political strategists are exploiting the mathematical faults of the simple majority vote. This book presents a solution to the spoiler problem: a system called range voting, already widely used on the Internet, is the fairest voting method of all, according to computer studies. Range voting remains controversial, however, and author Poundstone assesses the obstacles confronting any attempt to change the American electoral system.--From publisher description.