✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

CS106B At the ballot box

web.stanford.edu · 1,560 words · saved by 1 readers

In 1887, French mathematician Joseph Bertrand pondered an idealized election conducted between two candidates, A and B. Each voter casts a ballot for a single candidate and adds it to a sealed box. When the polls close, the box is shaken to mix up the order and ballots are removed one by one and tallied. At the end of the tally, candidate A has more votes than B and wins the election. Bertrand's question was: What is the likelihood that the winning candidate A is strictly ahead of candidate B throughout the entire tally? Although Bertrand posed the question in terms of probability, his answer uses an argument based on counting. An ordering of the ballots where the eventual winner is always in the lead is considered a favorable ordering. If you count the number of favorable orderings and divide by the count of all possible orderings, this ratio is the likelihood of a random ordering being a favorable one. Consider an election with only three ballots: two cast for A and one for B. The ba

CS106B At the ballot box At the ballot box Assignment written by Julie Zelenski ## 🖐🏿🖐🏼 November 7th: [Democracy Day](https://democracyday.stanford.edu/) 🖐🏻🖐🏽 Register, research, volunteer ➟ [Stanford Votes](https://www.stanfordvotes.org/) _"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting"_ -- Tom Stoppard, Jumpers {: .alert-success .alert .text-center} --> In 1887, French mathematician Joseph Bertrand pondered an idealized election conducted between two candidates, A and B . Each voter casts a ballot for a single candidate and adds it to a sealed box. When the polls close, the

Explore this link on the map →

related reading