The Armchair Politician

This one is going to be short, sweet, and to the point. I’ve had to respond to dozens of people who believe that voting for a third party is somehow a waste of your vote. From my perspective, this couldn’t be any farther from the truth.

As I see it, a vote for a third party carries far more weight than a vote for one of the primary parties. When you vote, for instance, Libertarian, your vote gives them proportionally more media coverage, funding, and ballot access than either of the established parties receive. As recent example, both Greens and Libertarians received enormously disproportional amounts of coverage (the Greens in particular) after the 2000 election. Why? The percentage of their votes, in many states, was well above the margin between the two primary candidates. Most political analysts believed that the Green Party significantly swung the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, and as a result, they gained more media coverage than anyone could have predicted.
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It looks like the research of Dr. DeMaio and myself is starting to pay off. As you may recall, we’re searching for prime numbers that lie within the domain of Stirling Numbers of the Second Kind. Essentially it is nothing more than a function with two parameters, and we are looking at the primality of the result for all combinations of values given as input to the function.
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