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"Math Against Tyranny", by Will Hively. Discover, November 1996, pages 74-85.
Presidential elections often revive debate about the fairness of choosing the president through electoral colleges, rather than by popular vote. This article describes the work of physicist Alan Natapoff, who has developed a mathematical way of proving that the electoral college system is fairer. This non-intuitive result can be seen operating in the structure of sports events such as the World Series: The team that wins the most games wins the series, even if its total number of runs is less than that of its opponent. According to Natapoff's reasoning, the article says, the electoral college system converts "one large national contest into 51 smaller elections in which individual voters have more clout."
-Allyn Jackson
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