2024 Global Elections and Voting

By Madeleine Kando

The year 2024 will be the year of elections: four billion people will cast a vote in over 60 countries, which is about half of the world’s population. 900 million in India, 200 million in Indonesia, 160 million in the US and so on.

But the election that the entire world is most anxious about is the US Presidential election. If we elect a leader that encourages Russia to attack those NATO nations that fall short on defence-spending and admires dictators, many countries will think twice about their allegiance to America.

Many foreigners think that if a Democrat wins the White House, the whole country must have voted for that candidate. Vice-versa, if a Republican wins the Presidency, it means that the whole country is Republican. That is because the two-party system is a foreign concept for countries that do not have our voting system.

In America, every district elects a single representative. Voters cast a vote for a candidate, one candidate wins, and all the others lose. This makes our elections “winner-take-all” — if a candidate wins 51 percent of the vote, she wins 100 percent of the representation. Any voters who did not back the winning candidate are not represented in government. 

First Past the Post vs Proportional Representation

The First Past the Post system is one of the least democratic systems by global standards. In fact, some political scientists wonder if it qualifies as democratic at all. But clearly some people think this is the best way to organize elections.

With a Proportional Representation system, on the other hand, the percentage of seats reflects the percentage of votes. If a party wins 40% of the vote, it will receive 40% of the seats. It is the most widely used system in the world and can be found in almost every country.

The Single Member District system, part of the First Past the Post scenario, guarantees that a large portion of voters will not be represented. The laws are vague on whether the single-member district system is Constitutionally locked in, or whether States have overriding authority on how to select their representatives. 

But the problem with an established voting system is that it is resistant to change. Our two-party system has been in place since Thomas Jefferson and Madison disagreed on whether a central government was necessary and how much power it should have. Ever since then, partisan polarization pulled the parties further apart by a bunch of ideologists, like a piece of chewing gum, to the point of breaking.

Read more...

Is Math a Discovery or an Invention?

Thomas Kando 

(Note: the title of this article is similar to an article by Mario Liovo from which I quote extensively, below) 

I have been thinking about the relationship between the universe and mathematics. Humans have measured and given numbers to various objects. The earth’s circumference is 40,000 kilometers. The speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second. When I first learned about the earth’s size in elementary school geography class, I thought “wow! How neat. How come the earth is exactly 40,000 kilometers in size? What a coincidence. Such a simple and memorable whole number.” 

Of course, I was putting the cart before the horse. I did not understand that “kilometer” is not an a priori characteristic of nature. The earth is (approximately) 40,000 kilometers in circumference because humans decided to use as their basic unit of length one forty millionth of the earth’s circumference, however long that is. They called it the meter, of which one thousand added together make a kilometer. 

The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's polar circumference is approximately 40,000. (metre) 

But it was later determined that its length was short by about 0.2 millimetres because of miscalculation of the flattening of the Earth, making the prototype about 0.02% shorter than the original proposed definition of the metre. Regardless, this length became the French standard and was adopted by most of the rest of the world. So the polar circumference of the Earth is actually 40,008 kilometres, instead of 40,000. (Earth’s Circumference) 

Then there is the speed of light: Light travels at (nearly) 300,000 kilometers per second (in a vacuum). How convenient! I thought as a youngster. Like earth’s circumference, the speed of light is also a neat, simple and memorable quantity. 

Of course humans must deal with natural phenomena in order to survive, so we have developed measurement systems. These are arbitrary, but hopefully as practical and as scientifically usable as possible. We must measure everything - time, temperature, electricity, weight, distance, speed, you name it. A decimal system seems to be advantageous over alternative systems, as exemplified by temperature: water freezes at zero and boils at 100. Neat and easy. A liter of water weights a kilo, which is a thousand grams. Simple. 

Read more...

The Story of a Decal Sticker

By Madeleine Kando

One sunny day, as the winter's snow began to melt, the bird decal on my window pondered why he was stuck there, his wings immobilized for eternity. 




He gazed out onto the yard, the late afternoon shadows growing longer, watching real birds fly by and feed at the bird feeders."Why am I sitting here, collecting dust? Is my sole purpose in life to prevent real birds from crashing into the glass? I long to be free! A strong hailstorm could dislodge me from this glass, and I could fly! Am I not a bird, after all?"

 

He wriggled and wriggled, but nothing happened. His back was firmly attached to the glass. All this wriggling tired him out, so he started to doze off and soon fell into a deep sleep. Decals dream, you know. They might be flat, but they dream of soaring in the blue sky. In his dream, he was looking down at houses with large windows with strange shapes stuck to them. Those shapes evoked something familiar, a past life, another world, stirring feelings of dread, mixed with relief.

A loud crash jolted him awake. Not a foot away, he saw a huge red-tailed hawk. He had seen those monsters before. A shiver went through his flat body.




The hawk's talons were kneading something on the ground. A pigeon had collided with the glass and lay on the ground, dazed and motionless. The hawk, perched on a branch, had swooped down, pinning the pigeon before it could escape. It was now slowly kneading the life out of him, patiently waiting until the pigeon's body gradually stopped moving. Then, it expanded its enormous wings and flew away with the dead pigeon dangling from its powerful claws.




The decal felt sorry for the pigeon but thought:"What good am I stuck here if I cannot even stop birds from crashing into the window?"

He sadly looked out on the falling snow, fearing that he would never fly, never hop on the bird feeder, or sing to attract a mate.

Read more...

Weird Electorates

Tom Kando 

Recent poll numbers: In head-to-head matchups, Trump leads Biden by five points (49 to 44) and Haley leads Biden by thirteen points (52 to 39). 

I don’t get it. The electorate seems to have lost its senses. 

Not that Americans are alone. The wacky rightward political trend is taking place in many countries, We live in an age of reactionary nationalism and populism. This is clearest in Europe and in the US, where the former dominant group - white men, by and large - is panicking at the prospect of sharing power with the growing other groups. 

Coincidentally, several of the countries where the Far Right is on the march are places where I grew up: Hungary, where I was born, has been led by the extreme right-wing prime minister Viktor Orban for nearly two decades. Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, the extreme right has also gained force in France, where I spent much of my childhood. And Holland, the country where I spent my next ten years, has also recently elected a far-right majority. In several such countries, (Holland and France, among them), farmers are one of the most vocal and angry constituents of this conservative resurgence. Other examples of the trend include Italy, where prime minister Giorgia Meloni strongly opposes the influx of immigrants, and Britain which, under Brexit, decided eight years ago to withdraw from the European Union. 

And then we have the US. 2024 may well see the return of Donald Trump into the White House. I fail to see how replacing Biden with Trump (or Haley, for that matter) would be good for this country. Let me briefly re-state the obvious: 

We must re-elect Joe Biden. This is a no-brainer. You and I might prefer a younger candidate, for instance Gavin Newsom, but neither he nor any other viable young candidate is running. We are now left with two alternatives. Nikki Haley and Donald Trump. The latter is so abnormal psychologically as to place the country - indeed, the whole world - in danger. He is utterly incompetent in dealing with foreign countries, be they allies or adversaries. He alienates other heads of state by insulting them. He plays golf instead of running the country. Haley is not dangerous and incompetent in the same extreme way as Trump. However, her policies regarding most issues (abortion, immigration, the economy, foreign affairs, etc.) would be contrary to what most Americans need and desire.

Read more...