Elections are surrounded by numbers. How many electors are needed to win the presidency? How many points are needed for a representative to capture a district? What percentage of Americans will vote in the upcoming election? All of these numbers are important, meaningful, and useful to understanding what is going on in elections, but some numbers are more important than others, and in the context of our current American democracy, where we follow the rule of one person, one vote, and live in an era of close elections, the most important number of all is...one.
