This is the first in this series of optional lessons about voting systems. The activities in this lesson are about voting on issues where there are two choices. Students use equivalent ratio concepts and skills developed in grade 6 to compare voting results of two groups, to determine whether an issue wins an election with a supermajority rule, and discover that a few people can determine the results of an election when very few people vote.

Most of the activities use students’ skills from earlier units to reason about ratios in the context of real-world problems (MP2). While some of the activities do not involve much computation, they all require serious thinking. In many activities, students have to make choices about how to understand election results and justify their methods (MP3).

Most importantly, this lesson addresses topics that are important for citizens in a democracy to understand. Students may want to discuss the unfairness of the results when only a few people vote. Consider collaborating with a civics or government teacher to learn how the fictional middle-school situations in this lesson relate to real-world elections, being mindful of the impact of elections on the lives of students and their families.