Thank you to everyone who voted in our election. Given that we had 29 votes and the entire population of the world was eligible to vote, the turnout was around 0.000000041%, which was slightly lower than in the general election. We are not sure whether this was because the election was not very well advertised to the entire world, or because the people did not feel that their votes would matter in the election, or because people felt so disillusioned by all the major digits that they did not want to be involved in the system. However, this is a 10... (that is 1 0recurring, or 10000000…) times increase from their last election, when calculating the percentage of votes each candidate got caused a DivideByZero Error and almost broke the computer system and the Internet, and if votes continue to increase at this rate, we may have to get extra help for counting the results.
Also, sorry for not sending the results out earlier. I was incredibly tired last night, and the Internet appears to have broken whilst I was away, or at least the way you use the Internet has significantly changed over the last week. Previously, I could click the little Wifi thing in the corner of the screen, find the network and press “Connect”, which all seemed rather too simple, but it worked. However, now if I want to get Internet, I need to walk all the way down the stairs, sit right next to the router, follow the procedure that used to work, and then come back up the stairs. This will work for some length of time between 1 minute and 2 hours, and then I get to repeat the above. Of course, I could just stay downstairs with the router, but the router is conveniently located in a completely empty room which is currently quite dusty, and it doesn’t seem like the ideal place to use Internet. Anyway, I didn’t write this newsletter to complain about the Internet, although it is really annoying.
Anyway, the important thing is the election results. By any sensible method of voting, 1 was the winner! This isn’t surprising, as we have often said that 1 is one of our top ten favourite digits, although admittedly we have said this about lots of the digits. We can look more closely at the votes to see what was going on and who would have won using different voting systems.
Firstly, who would have won if the voting system was first past the post? For anyone who doesn’t know, first past the post is a voting system where you only consider first votes, and the candidate with the most votes win. Confusingly, there is no post. I mean, I didn’t expect there to be a real post, but there isn’t really even a metaphorical post. Instead, you run the race, see how far everyone got, and then you place the post. Alternatively, I guess you could imagine that the first person is holding the post and everyone wants to finish with the post, but that isn’t really a race at all. Anyway, using the first past the post system, 1 wins with five votes, although 6, 7 and 8 are close behind, tied on four votes each. Since you need lots of pretty graphs after an election, we have made lots of pretty graphs using Excel, and this is a pretty graph showing the winner using First Past the Post. From this, it would seem that 2 did really badly.
Another possible system of voting used a points system, allocating 3 points for first, 2 points for second, 1 point for third and -2 points for last. 1 won this way also, and it made this pretty graph:
From this data, 1 clearly wins, but what is interesting is what has happened to last place. 2 no longer looks like it is really unpopular, although it still doesn’t have much support. This is due to the large number of people who voted for 2 in third place. In fact, this was the opinion expressed by the most people – clearly 2 is a very third place number. 5, on the other hand, is on a negative score. It seems to be quite unpopular.
Another system of voting that some people like is Alternative Voting. This is a bit more complicated than First Past the Post, and it doesn’t have any pretty pictures, unfortunately. Basically, everyone’s first votes are counted, and then the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed between the rest of the candidates according to who these voters voted for second. And so on. This doesn’t have as many pretty pictures. It is also a bit difficult to count, as lots of counting is required, although not that difficult. However, if you decide that counting isn’t allowed and instead you have to write a Python program to do it, then it does become quite difficult. Assuming my Python program worked, the winner of the election was 1. The results worked like this:
(I've omitted this as it's very long, and was actually incorrect. It'll be posted in the next post)
It seems to be working, although I haven’t tested it very thoroughly, and this probably wasn’t the best use of time. If anyone wants a Python program for AV, then please tell me. This makes it look like quite a close election between 8 and 1, and before all the votes had been counted, 8 did seem to be doing quite well, however 1 is still the overall winner. 8 says “we have done very well in this election, and we have got a quite a few votes, but sadly nobody cares because we didn’t win.”
It seems that 1 won the election by all three methods of voting. Nobody is quite sure what this means, but 1 is very pleased and smiley, and almost all of the other numbers have quit, because that seems to be what happens after elections. (I’m sure we had a lot more politicians before the election…) Given that, in its manifesto, 1 was the Unity Party and was going to create a Communist government, I am slightly concerned about this, but 1 says “This has been a fantastic result for the Unity party, and we will make the world much betterer and everything will be great”, which I’m sure you will find very reassuring.
However, there were some other important elections. The most unpopular digit, won by the digit with the most negative results, was 0. It seems that, while the multiplicative identity is very popular, the additive identity is equally unpopular. The results for the most negative votes looks like this:
0 is clearly ahead, although 7 was initially doing very well. It seems that when voters were told to select a number between 0 and 9 that they liked least, they also selected 7. 7 says “we have lost a lot of unsupport in this election, and I am sad to say that we are not the most unpopular digit. We are not the most popular digit either. This is really disappointing, because now people aren’t paying as much attention to me as I would like them to be. As a result, I will resign, hopefully in a really loud obvious way that attracts a lot of attention and makes people interested in me again. I might then run again as leader, because to be honest I quite like the attention and I think I should be the centre of the sevenverse, which is like the universe, only based around the number 7”.
Finally, there is also the Least Interest party, the party which got the most votes that didn’t mention them either positively or negatively. The results for that looked like this:
6 wins this one, although 5 is close behind. Neither wished to comment on the election results.
This seems to be all of the results from the digit election. If you actually read the output from the AV program, you may have noticed two extra candidates, pi and LIZARD PEOPLE. These were voted for even though they were not on the official list, and even though they are not technically digits. If they had been elected, then their property of not being a digit might have caused concern, however, luckily they did not receive many votes. Maybe next year they will do better.
We hope you have enjoyed these elections. If there is anyone who was involved in this election, but is not on this e-mail list, then please forward them the results.
