Making your vote count

Our elections are clearly ineffective, with the results seldom reflecting the will of the most people. Many even say it’s rigged — with gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter fraud.

But arguably it’s the way we vote that causes more problems than any other aspect of our elections. Our “choose-one” method (called plurality voting) is unrepresentative, inaccurate, and unfair due to vote-splitting.

But what if there’s a better way, a more intelligent way, a way of calculating results that’s more likely to lead to the selection of highly qualified candidates who best reflect the will of the voters?

Click the button below to try four different methods of tallying results.

What’s wrong with plurality voting?

In plurality voting, we each vote for our favorite candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins.

Plurality voting is fine for deciding between two candidates. However, it doesn’t work well in elections with three or more candidates, as you might encounter in a party primary, when there are several candidates, and a very good chance that the best won’t win.

To illustrate just one of several problems with this method, Consider the following scenario.

In an election between one big hat candidate and one small hat candidate, the big hat candidate wins easily. People prefer big hats.

But, what if a second candidate enters the race with a nearly identical big hat, thus neatly splitting the big hat coalition?

Most people wanted a big hat, but they ended up with a small hat, not because small hats are more popular, but because the big hats split the majority vote.

How do we ensure that the better hat wins?

Well, let’s try an experiment, but instead of hats, we’ll use human beings, specifically a group of human beings that Joe Biden might be inclined to choose as his running mate.

You’ll cast your vote using each of the leading voting methods. Each has different degrees of expressiveness and simplicity. See how each one feels, then after the votes are all in we’ll compare the results.

Please play along and cast your vote as if this was a real election. It will make the results much more meaningful to analyze and discuss. And, who knows — maybe we can even influence Joe's decision! Let’s find out if different methods pick different winners and discuss what that reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of each method:

After casting your votes, you'll have the option of registering to attend a live panel discussion of the election results.