Democracy, power and percentage
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You can go and see the election results (if you don’t know yet) on the local newspaper’s website. There are also interesting articles, comments and numbers.
Let’s play a little bit with the numbers.
The old/new mayor got 61.6% of the votes. Most people never look further, so the general assumption might be: he will represent 61.6% of us - a clear majority. And the democracy sometimes is also called the rule of the majority, so everything is OK. However, if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll find out only 38.2% of the eligible voters participated in this election. Numberwise it means: 171,395 persons voted out of the 448,096 who could have. The 61.6% actually is the sixty percent of the 171,395 = 104,379 votes.
With some basic math skills you can calculate this is 23.3% of all the voters!
In other words: because of the electoral apathy, less than a quarter of the voters placed the mayor in power to rule the whole city. I know, this is the game of the system, this is how it works. Still, remember these numbers when you feel like complaining about the City Hall… Were you in the remaining 15.1% who voted (but not for Katz) or among the 61.8% non-voters?
October 26th, 2006 at 13:45