It's Election Day in the United States. Across the nation, millions of ballots are being cast. But what would happen if the rules of our electoral system were changed? Certain states are about to find out. This year, several places have alternative voting systems up for consideration on their ballots, and those systems could set an example for voting reform throughout the rest of the country. Short Wave producer Hannah Chinn and host Emily Kwong dive into three voting methods that are representative of those systems: Where they've been implemented, how they work, and what they might mean for elections in the future. What to hear more about the math powering our lives? Email us at [email protected] and we might cover your idea on a future episode! Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Full Episode
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. It's election day here in the States. If you can vote and you're listening to this, maybe you voted early. Maybe you mailed in your ballot. Maybe you're waiting at a polling place listening to Shortwave right now. Regardless, before you even marked a ballot, there was a choice already made for you.
And that's the choice of which voting system to use. Hey, Hannah Chen. Hi, Emily. Hannah, our producer today is going to tell us about some of those voting systems. Though, wait, hold on. What is a voting system? Good question. So for our purposes, a voting system is the set of rules that you use to determine the winner of an election. Uh-huh.
And there are a lot of different rules that you can use. So to illustrate this, I talked to a math professor at George Washington University in D.C. His name is Dan Ullman. And for the past 20 years, on and off, he's been teaching this class called math and politics. And on the very first day of class, he has all his students conduct a mock election.
There are three candidates and there are 99 voters in this little scenario that I made up. But it's made to be a very close election.
The 99 voters are these made-up people. Oh, so it's not the students. No, no, no, no. But they know all the preferences of these 99 imaginary voters. Okay. Whether they like, say, candidate A more than candidate B, or candidate B more than candidate C, or maybe they like candidate B the most and they're indifferent to both A and C. Interesting. Okay, so then what happens?
So they have to decide which election rules they're going to use. So maybe they want to weight the votes, right? Each voter's first choice gets two points and each voter's second choice gets one and their last choice gets zero and they tally up all those points to decide who wins. Yeah. Or maybe they have a first round of voting and then the top two advance to like a runoff vote.
Or maybe they're just going to count each voter's first choice and just totally ignore their other preferences. He's letting them, like, change the rules of the game. Right. Okay. But again, Dan has created all of these imaginary voter profiles, right? He knows what's in them. So depending on the election rules that the class uses, they're going to end up with a different winner.
Any two different methods, if they're actually different, could conceivably lead to a different result.
That's striking. Yeah. And Emily, this isn't because of voter fraud or like double counting ballots or anything. These are all perfectly legitimate ways to count voter preferences.
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