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Here's a question I'm confused on:

Citizen of Mooresville: Mooresville's current city council is having a ruinous effect on municipal finances. Since a majority of the incumbents are running for re-election, I am going to campaign against all these incumbents in the upcoming city council election. The only incumbent I will support and vote for is the one who represents my own neighborhood, because she has the experience necessary to ensure that our neighborhood's interests are served. If everyone in Mooresville would follow my example, we could substantially change the council's membership.

Assuming that each citizen of Mooresville is allowed to vote only for a city council representative from his or her own neighborhood, for the council's membership to be changed substantially, it must be true that:

A. (answer) at least some other voters in Mooresville do not make the same exception for their incumbent in the upcoming election

Really confused by this. The explanations I've been seeing is that if everyone follows his plan, the same people will be voted in again. But I don't see how that's true. What if not only the incumbent from the city council is running, but also 2 other good incumbents?

Is the citizen saying that the incumbent he is voting for is the ONLY one in the neighborhood? and that if everyone follows his plan, then they would be voting for the ONLY incumbent in the neighborhood, which presumably would be the one running for re-election? I'm confused here...

WTF?? This is the name of the town I live in? What practice test is this from?

Bigsby wrote:Here's a question I'm confused on:

Citizen of Mooresville: Mooresville's current city council is having a ruinous effect on municipal finances. Since a majority of the incumbents are running for re-election, I am going to campaign against all these incumbents in the upcoming city council election. The only incumbent I will support and vote for is the one who represents my own neighborhood, because she has the experience necessary to ensure that our neighborhood's interests are served. If everyone in Mooresville would follow my example, we could substantially change the council's membership.

A. (answer) at least some other voters in Mooresville do not make the same exception for their incumbent in the upcoming election

Really confused by this. The explanations I've been seeing is that if everyone follows his plan, the same people will be voted in again. But I don't see how that's true. What if not only the incumbent from the city council is running, but also 2 other good incumbents?

Is the citizen saying that the incumbent he is voting for is the ONLY one in the neighborhood? and that if everyone follows his plan, then they would be voting for the ONLY incumbent in the neighborhood, which presumably would be the one running for re-election? I'm confused here...

If you're only voting for representatives of your own neighborhood, and everyone makes the same exception that the author of the argument did (I'll kick out all the bums except for the person who represents my neighborhood) then you end up with all incumbents re-elected.

This is similar to how the US Congress actually works. You will usually see opinion polls for Congress to be ridiculously low, like 20-30%, rarely getting above 50%. However, we keep electing incumbents because individual representatives usually have much higher approval rates. Everyone hates Congress but likes their represenatives. Same thing works for the school system, people say in general teachers are mediocre, but approval ratings for their children's teacher are usually much higher.