At Issue In a Massachusetts Town, the Value of Two-Thirds

An anonymous reader writes "In Truro, Massachusetts (a town on Cape Cod), a zoning decision came up for vote, where the results were 136 for, 70 against. The vote required 2/3 approval to pass. The Town Clerk and Town Accountant believe that since .66 * 206 is less than 136, the vote passes. However, an 'anonymous caller' noted that a more accurate value of 2/3 would require 137 (or perhaps even 138 votes) for the measure to be considered passed. The MA Secretary of State and State Attorney General are hard at work to resolve this issue." Updated 20100422 23:55 by timothy: Oops! This story is a year old (rounding up), which I didn't spot quickly enough. Hope they've got it all worked out in the meantime.

Comments

Re:not quite 2/3

[hldn]

i was taking this basic 'intro to' math class. i got the first exam back, and most of my answers were marked incorrect when i knew they were right. the supposedly correct answers were written on my test and some were relatively close, while some were not. perhaps you can guess where this is going.

i asked the teacher what was up and as she was checking my test, i saw her answer sheet had her work shown on it and realized quickly what the problem was. yes, she had rounded all the fractions to two place decimals as she went, introducing sometimes large errors to the final answer when many fractions were involved. one of the correct answers was actually an integer and she had a decimal! lolwut?

the test was copied straight out of a book and had an answer key of it's own. i showed this to her and that the books answers were the same as mine and tried to explain what she was doing wrong, but she just didn't understand.

anyway, i dropped that class asap.

Re:basic math

[farmkid]

Since the original post is so brief, it's difficult to determine its intent. However, the usual intimation of such quotes is to imply that the 3/5ths valuation was immoral because slaves should have been counted fully, i.e., as 5/5ths.

But this is exactly counter to the various political goals of the time: the northern colonies, who were more generally against slavery (yes, there was still slavery in the North, but I'm describing averages) wanted the slaves to not be counted at all, while the southern colonies demanded that they count as a full person.

The reason? The census -- and it was only the census for which this definition was intended -- determined how many representatives each state could send to Washington. Northern, and sorta generally anti-slavery colonies, wanted to not count the slaves at all; if they're not fully-enfranchised citizens, why should the 'owners' get the Federal advantage of the extra legislative muscle that the extra census count would provide?

The southern colonies, on the other hand wanted slaves fully counted so as to maximize the pro-slavery clout that the South might exert through the additional members in the House of Representatives.

So, the old saw that evaluating slaves as "3/5ths human" is both a gross misrepresentation of the original intent (it had nothing to do with their status as human beings), and of the political impact of this count: the politically correct view would be to count them as zero, thereby depriving the slave-holding states of the census advantage.