Distinction
Though plurality (first-past-the post) is often mistaken for majority rule, they are not the same. Plurality makes the options with the most votes the winner, regardless of whether the fifty percent threshold is passed. This is equivalent to majority rule when there are only two alternatives. However, when there are more than two alternatives, it is possible for plurality to choose an alternative that has fewer than fifty percent of the votes cast in its favor.
Read more about this topic: Majority Rule
Famous quotes containing the word distinction:
“Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
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—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)