The regular session of Circle 99 in the online format this Sunday was dedicated to the topic "Quantitative aspects of electoral models and fair elections," and the keynote speaker was the director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy, the president of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian-American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ismar Volić from Wellesley College. reminded that in the age of technology, quantitative political literacy is crucial in a modern democratic society. "If anything, the Corona showed us that. We were inundated with numbers, statistics, and graphs that most of the time we couldn't understand. Without quantitative literacy in the age of technology, there is no progress. However very little attention is paid to political quantitative literacy, and this is not the case only in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In America, it is the same case. However, there are more and more academic workers and statisticians who collaborate with historians and who are dedicated to this issue," Volić said. He pointed out that electoral systems are important for research and that this issue is important for America but also Bosnia and Herzegovina. He also spoke about the electoral system in the United States, which they want to transfer to Bosnia and Herzegovina. transferred to Bosnia and Herzegovina", assessed Volić. He also thinks that the relative majority with which we vote almost everywhere in the world is very incoherent, insufficient, and mathematically incomplete. He also points out that choosing the candidate who gets the most votes sounds good, but it is wrong. "As soon as there are three or more candidates, there is a chance that someone who got a minority of votes, not necessarily more than 50 percent of the votes," said Volić, whose 40 years already proved bad. "It has been a bad system in America for 200 years, but it is so deeply rooted in the American system, written in the Constitution, that it is difficult to change it. It collides with the citizen vote, and they are not compatible. It works in the hands of interest groups, and certain American states, so it is difficult to change it. It is clear to him that it does not work and that it should be eliminated. It is an absolute tragedy to talk about the introduction of such a system in BiH because no one exists who does not want such a wrong system of electing the president, is the opinion of today's presenter. He underlined that this system should not be introduced in Bosnia and Herzegovina and that it is mathematically inapplicable. "It has quantitative and mathematical problems and shows that it is not a model that can serve representative democracy—one person, one vote. It is absolutely in collision with that basic principle," he assessed. Electoral voting is a system according to which, for example, the American president is chosen by a body called the Electoral College. Electors are delegated to the college by each federal state, depending on the number of its inhabitants, so California, the most populous, sends 55 of them there, followed by Texas with 38 and New York and Florida, each with 29. Sparsely populated states such as Alaska, Vermont, Delaware, Wyoming, or Montana have only three electors each. To win, the presidential candidate must receive an absolute majority of electors, i.e. 270 out of 538 of them.(https://www.klix.ba/)
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