Louisiana Runoff

When your sitting in class at eight o'clock on a Tuesday morning and your learning about voting theories, there is one thing that you can bet everyone's thinking, when the hell am I going to use this? I've never even heard of runoff or Condorcet. Although this is a fairly relevant concern, there may come a time and place where you may see these methods used, maybe even in the United States. Most people in the US believe that the method of plurality is the only voting method used, and for the most part, that's true. But like any rule, there's always that one exception. For this particular rule, that exception is Louisiana.

Every state in the country uses plurality when voting for their primaries, but Louisiana uses a non-partisan method of voting that works in a slightly different way than traditional runoff. On election day, all candidates run regardless of their party affiliation. If no one voter receives 50% or more of the over all votes, than no one wins that round of voting. Instead what will happens is another vote will be held a month latter, but this time it will be between the two candidates that received the most votes in the original election. Using this idea of voting allows the state to make sure that the candidate that wins the election, really does have the majority support of the state.

Now looking at Louisiana's method of primary elections is pretty easily related to contemporary math today. Louisiana is, I believe, the easiest and most prevalent example of alternative voting in the United States. If it wasn't for Louisiana, there would be only one voting system for the US and that would be a mathematical tragedy.

Throughout the world, the method of voting in Louisiana does not really have that great of an impact. However, the idea of runoff is a method that is very prevalent in many arts of the world. Take France for example; France is a country that as been using the runoff since the