voting systems – Rachel Navarre

America the Purple

November 3, 2016 by RachelNo Comments

As you may have noticed, I often use this blog as a placeholder to keep track of information that may come in useful in teaching. Along with the questions I highlighted in my last post, one of the other big confusions I find is understanding the voting system we have.

TV to the rescue! Adam Ruins Everything covers the Electoral College and Gerrymandering. And to top it off- SOURCES.

Picture for the post is a modified version from Howard, Chris. What America Looks Like. 2012. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Explaining voting systems

August 10, 2016August 11, 2016 by Rachel Comment Closed

(Originally posted on my old blog on Nov. 27, 2013; image by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons)

Voting systems are hard to introduce to students, especially some of the more creative ones. Fortunately, the internet has some really helpful resources to help explain different voting systems and the effect they have on parliaments. One of the best resources I’ve found comes from New Zealand. As part of their 2011 referendum on the electoral system, they put out several short and sweet videos that explained five different types of voting systems. You can find them all here.

Also, as a bonus, here’s a clip from the BBC that explains the D’Hondt system of allocating seats after the election. Because I know understanding this was keeping you up at night.

What is proportional representation?

August 10, 2016August 10, 2016 by Rachel Comment Closed

(Originally posted on my old blog on Nov 27, 2013)

Here’s a quick video starting John Cleese where he tries to sell UK voters on switching to a proportional representation system (spoiler alert: he fails). It covers the basics of how a system would work. While it’s rather old school, it still provides a very basic introduction to what this whole PR thing is about.

http://youtu.be/NSUKMa1cYHk