I need to stop being such a perfectionist and publish things I’ve done, even if they aren’t as complete as I would like. Here are some: Merrill 1984 I’ve reproduced all the tables and figures from A Comparison of Efficiency of Multicandidate Electoral Systems using my own simulator written in Python, then…

This Atlantic article by Jonathan Haidt about increasing political polarization in the US is fantastic, and resonates a lot with me. One of the solutions proposed in the article is voting method reform: Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average…

In seemingly every discussion thread about American politics, the same conversation happens again and again: “Man, both political parties suck.” “Yeah, we really need a third party.” “But any third party entering the race acts as a spoiler, so nobody votes for them.” “That’s why we need Ranked Choice Voting…

It looks like Instant-Runoff Voting, a type of ranked-choice voting, is going to be on the ballot in NYC. Unfortunately, IRV is a poorly-designed plurality-runoff system, which works fine when there are only one or two strong candidates, but can fail whenever there are three or more, causing it to…

When discussing voting method reform, we often talk about concepts like the majority criterion, which requires that “If one candidate is ranked first by a majority (more than 50%) of voters, then that candidate must win”. This seems like an obviously desirable quality, if you grew up with “democracy” being…

Instant-Runoff Voting is a voting method where voters rank candidates, who are then eliminated in a series of simulated runoff elections. …