A primary election lesson where each student sees a winner most voters didn't pick

Why this matters

A student who hears "Ana won" can assume most voters picked Ana. In a primary with five candidates, the winner can have a third of the votes. A student who mixes up "the most" and "more than half" can still pass a vocabulary quiz on plurality and majority, and the teacher has to wait for the unit test to find out.

Malik's chat: did the winner get most of the votes?

Malik is a middle schooler running for student council against four classmates. He knows a primary picks a party's candidate. He thinks the winner of any election got most of the votes.

The whole class gets the same activity: the same greeting, the same ballot with five made-up candidates, and the same questions about delegates and the Electoral College. Each student splits the 100 voters their own way, so each student's chart is different, and Sparky's next message depends on that student's numbers and answers.

Sparky sends the student back to their own chartSparky charts the student's own numbersA right answer gets a harder questionSparky uses the student's own election

M

Malik

Interest: Running for student council against four classmatesStarting point: Thinks the winner of any election got most of the votes

Sparky

Hi! Today you'll run a made-up primary election. A primary is how a political party picks its candidate for president. This one has five candidates, and you decide how 100 voters split. To start, have you ever been part of a vote with more than two choices, like a class election or a team vote? Tell me about it.

Malik

yeah im running for student council right now against 4 other kids

Sparky

Here's your ballot for the Riverside Party primary. Split 100 voters among the five candidates however you think the vote would go. Each candidate needs at least 5 votes, and the total must be exactly 100. Who do you think wins?

Malik

ana 32, ben 24, cara 19, dev 14, eli 11. ana wins

Sparky

Those add up to 100 and everyone has at least 5, so let's chart it. Ana wins with 32 votes. Did she get most of the votes, or did most voters pick someone else?

Malik

yeah ana got the most so she got most of the votes

Sparky

Look at your chart and add up the bars for everyone except Ana: Ben, Cara, Dev and Eli. Picture your student council race with five candidates. If you won with 32 of 100 votes, would most of the class have voted for you?

Malik

oh wait. ben cara dev and eli add up to 68. so 68 people didnt pick ana, she only got 32

Understanding check

Exactly right. Ana got the most votes, which is called a plurality, but 68 out of 100 voters picked someone else, so she did not get a majority. Now a harder question. In this primary, a candidate needs at least 15% of the vote to get any delegates. Look at your chart and the dashed line. Which of your five candidates leave with delegates?

Malik

ana ben and cara. dev only has 14 so hes under the line

Sparky

That's right. Ana, Ben and Cara clear the line, and Dev's 14 puts him just under it, so he gets nothing. Why do you think a party might want a rule like that?

Malik

so the delegates dont get split up between a bunch of people who barely got any votes

Sparky

Good reasoning. In November, 48 states and Washington, D.C. give all of their electoral votes to whoever gets the most votes in that state, even if it's less than half. In 1992, Ross Perot got 18.9% of the national vote, almost 1 out of every 5 votes. How many electoral votes do you think he got, and why?

Malik

probably like 100 since he got almost 20 percent

Sparky

Look at the third-place bar in your chart. Cara got 19 votes. If this primary were winner-take-all, how many delegates would Cara get?

Malik

oh. cara gets nothing if ana wins. so if perot never came in first in any state he got 0

Sparky

Exactly. Perot came in first in zero states, so he got zero electoral votes, even with nearly 1 in 5 votes nationwide. Last question: can you write one sentence explaining the difference between winning the most votes and winning a majority?

Found that the winner got 32 of 100 votes, named the three candidates who get delegates, and explained why Ross Perot got 0 electoral votes

Malik said Ana got most of the votes because she got the most. Sparky didn't tell him the answer. It asked him to add up the other four bars in his own chart and to picture winning his own student council race with 32 votes, and he found the 68 himself. The 15% question and the Perot question were about his chart too: Dev's 14 was the bar under the line, and Cara's 19 was the third-place bar Sparky pointed him back to.

Malik and his chat are an example we wrote for this page. The ballot, the chart and Sparky's replies are from a test run of the activity, in which a student sent these same messages. Sparky's replies are shortened. The Riverside Party and its five candidates are made up. The 15% delegate rule is the one Democratic presidential primaries use, and the 1992 numbers are from the National Archives.

What Flint did for Malik

• Sparky drew a ballot with five made-up candidates in Malik's chat, so he had a real-looking primary to split his votes across.
• Sparky made a bar chart from Malik's own five numbers, with a dashed line at 15%.
• When Malik said the winner got most of the votes, Sparky sent him back to his chart and to his student council race instead of giving him the number.
• Once Malik saw the winner had 32 of 100, Sparky asked a harder question: which of his candidates get delegates under the 15% rule.

A teacher can't do this by hand for 30 students, and Sparky does it in every student's chat.

Who still thinks the winner got most of the votes

When a student gives three wrong answers, Sparky flags them for the teacher under Needs attention while the class is still working. When students finish, Sparky grades each chat against the activity's rubric and sums up the class on the activity page: what most students understood, which mistake came up most, and what to practice next.

Set up the activity for free

The Riverside primary activity is in Flint's public library, with Sparky's guidelines (the ballot, the delegate rule and the 1992 numbers, each with its source), the greeting and a rubric already set up. Open it, select Try this activity to copy it into a free Flint account, and move it to a class. Sparky draws the ballot in each student's chat after the student answers the greeting. In the activity settings, select Try session myself to test it as a student before you assign it.

For more social studies activities, see Flint for social studies.