Weighted Voting Systems - W.H. Freeman

CHAPTER 11 Weighted Voting Systems 405SPOTLIGHT11.3A Mathematical QuagmireA county legislature in the United States isusually called a Board of Supervisors. Unlikestate legislators, who represent districts that arecarefully drawn to be equal in population,supervisors in some counties represent townswithin the county. Because the towns differ inpopulation, weighted voting is used tocompensate for the resulting inequity.If each supervisor’s voting weight isproportional to the population of the town heor she represents, there will be situations inwhich one or more supervisors on a board aredummy voters, even if no supervisor is dictator.In a 1965 law review article, John F. Banzhaf IIIfound that three of the six supervisors ofNassau County, New York, were dummies. Thearticle inspired legal action against severalelected bodies that employ weighted votingsystems.The first legal challenge to weighted votingwas to invalidate the voting system of the Boardof Supervisors of Washington County, NewYork. In its decision, the New York State Courtof Appeals provided a way to fix a weightedvoting system: Each supervisor’s Banzhaf powerindex, rather than his or her voting weight,should be proportional to the population of thedistrict that he or she represents. The courtpredicted that its remedy would lead to a“mathematical quagmire.”Five lawsuits, filed over a period of 25years, challenged weighted voting in the NassauCounty Board of Supervisors. These casesproved to be the mathematical quagmire thatthe appeals court had feared. The courtsattempted to force Nassau County to complywith the Washington County decision.Although the county made a sincere attempt todo so, every voting system that it devised faceda new legal challenge. With conflicting experttestimony, the U.S. District Court finally ruledin 1993 that weighted voting was inherentlyunfair.Banzhaf’s law review article, which initiallydrew attention to weighted voting in NassauCounty, was aptly titled “Weighted VotingDoesn’t Work.”Nevertheless, tradition is hard to change.Many boards of supervisors of counties,particularly in the State of New York, still useweighted voting, and legal challenges to thepractice, even after the Nassau County decision,have not always been successful.To determine the Banzhaf power index of a voter A, we must count allpossible winning and blocking coalitions of which A is a member and casts acritical vote. The weight of a winning coalition must be q or more, where q isthe quota. A blocking coalition must be large enough to deny the “yes” votersthe q votes they need to win. If the total weight of all the voters is n, thenthe weight of the blocking coalition has to be more than n q. Assuming thatall weights are integers, this means that the weight of a blocking coalition mustbe at least n q 1.To determine which voters are critical in a given winning or blocking coalition,the following principle is useful.