Math Lesson

Hi everyone! It's been nearly a month since I last posted, hopefully it won't be as long before I post again. Anyway, the reason I am writing today is to give a little math lesson. I just got done watching a story on a local news station about the upcoming city council election in Cedar Rapids and the way the person they were interviewing, the county auditor I believe, defines a majority really annoys me. She said that the winner of the election needs fifty percent of the votes, plus one. Well that would be correct if an even number of votes are cast, but what if an odd number of votes are cast? Let's say that 99 votes are cast. Fifty percent of 99 votes is 49.5 votes. Adding one to that means that the winner needs to receive 50.5 votes. Since a candidate can't receive half of a vote, that means that a candidate would need to receive 51 votes to win, but this is not correct. A majority is simply more than fifty percent! So the winner would only need to receive 50 votes if 99 votes were cast. That would give him or her a majority with fifty and five-ninths percent of the total number of votes. At least she didn't say that the winner needs to receive fifty-one percent of the votes to win.