In this optional lesson, students investigate how elections use representatives to decide results. This lesson explores mathematical difficulties that arise in a representative democracy, where people do not vote individually, but vote for representatives who vote for all their constituents. The activities explore ways to “share” the representatives fairly between groups of people. However, sometimes the groups to be represented are predetermined, such as classrooms or states. It’s not always possible to have the same numbers of constituents per representative. The lesson explores simple and more complex sharing situations, first through giving computers to families and through representing students to the school board.

Most of the activities use students’ skills from earlier units to reason about ratios and proportional relationships in the context of real-world problems (MP2). While some of the activities do not involve much computation, they all require thorough consideration and decision making as students create and justify their plans (MP3). Students model with mathematics as they make assumptions, decide what is important, and determine reasonable quantities (MP4).