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Emmanuel Toledo

Professor Diaz

February 11, 2020

Math 1030

Part I: Iowa Caucuses

The Iowa Caucuses are biennial electoral events for members of the Democratic and

Republican parties, held in the stat of Iowa. However, it is very different from primary elections

that are held in other U.S. states. In most states registered voters go to polling places to cast ballots.

On the other hand, Iowans gather at local caucus meetings to discuss and vote on the candidates.

These places can be town halls, church buildings, school auditoriums, local fire stations and more.

They gather during both the presidential and midterm election seasons and are said to be strong

indicators of how well a presidential candidate will do during the elections. If a preference group

does not get enough people to be considered “viable”, caucus-goers can join another group, or try

to convince people to join their group. In the year 2020, instead of simply attending any one of

those locations they can live-stream from their mobile devices. In the past people from different

parts of the United States would travel to attend the caucuses held in Iowa. In general, Iowa

residents are the lowest percentage amongst the people that attend the caucuses.

One of the biggest reasons that the Iowa caucuses are so important is because it is the first

state in the United States where a ballot is cast. This state is the first indicator of whether a

prospective presidential candidate’s support is holding up. This gives candidates more room to

adjust their messages and programs in response to the results. They can adjust to gather more favor

with voters. It is said that about half of the winners of the Iowa Caucus go on to win their party’s
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nomination for the presidency, giving us the ability to see who may be nominated. On the other

hand, it also informs voters on who will not go very far in the elections so they can adjust their

own votes accordingly.

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Write a one-page (250-word) discussion explaining who won the election. The discussion
should include your interpretation of your calculations in Part II and which fairness criteria
helped you choose a winner.

Using the Plurality Method, Donald Trump won the election for this voting theory project. The
Plurality Method is the method I used to predict the outcome. In the United States, the plurality
method is the one we use the most familiar with. It determines that the presidential candidate with
the most first-preference votes is declared the winner. Ties are possible and, in their event, they
would have to be settled through some sort of run-off vote.
For this project, we had to imagine that we lived in Mason City, Iowa and attended a Republican
caucus for the Precinct W1-P2 at the Highland Golf Course. As attendees we were asked to vote
for our preference out of four following candidates: Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald
Trump.
In this Precinct there were 100 voters total that would determine which candidate would win the
election. In the table provided in Part II it showed the following:

In order to find out which candidate would win we had to divide the column with the highest total
votes from the total. In this case, column four had 39 votes making it the column with the most
votes. We would then divide 39 voters from the 100 total voters, the result would give us the
number for the majority vote. The majority vote indicates the winner of the election, in this case
the winner with the most votes was Donald Trump.