Normal Muller gets to vote.

Even if Asimov didn’t himself explain what he was doing in this story, its raison d'être is obvious enough—computers were first being used in a big way in the 1950’s to predict the results of elections from only a small number of votes. Asimov merely extrapolated where it all might lead.

This story is an interesting perspective on elections and what we want from them, what we mean by them, and how we got about them. It’s also an example of Asimov’s paternalistic attitude towards robots and computers—properly programmed, they can be far more benign about our futures than we can ourselves, something we also see in I, Robot and particularly "The Evitable Conflict.” It’s an interesting story for that, as a window into Asimov’s ideas.

The characters are stronger than usual for an Asimov story, but still not among his most memorable. Their situation is memorable, however, and how they react to it, also typical for an Asimov tale. This is definitely one of the high points of Earth is Room Enough.

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