Elections: Voting Methods

Elections are the only mechanism by which citizens can hope to maintain effective control over their government.  It is obviously crucial that elections work well. Equally obviously, elections have not been working at all well.  It is both critical and urgent that airtight integrity of elections be achieved and maintained.  Citizens must always be able to implicitly trust election results.  There are indeed serious integrity risks that need to be addressed, but that is a whole separate topic that is outside the scope of this course.  However, there also are several things which need to be fixed that would significantly improve how elections themselves function.  By far, the most serious single problem is continued use of the Plurality (or "first past the post") voting method, and that is our topic here.  In this course, you will learn why the Plurality voting method is truly awful and about the serious damage it is causing.  We will examine some of the many possible replacement voting methods and their characteristics.  Finally, you will learn about two newer voting methods, either of which is able to provide the large quantitative and qualitative improvement that is desperately needed.