Science Can Restore America's Faith in Democracy

In the aftermath of a contentious presidential campaign, there are signs that many Americans have lost faith in democracy, with allegations of election fraud, suggestions of Russian involvement, and complaints about the electoral college. But the problem runs still deeper: Like most other countries, individual states in the US employ the antiquated plurality voting system, in which each voter casts a vote for a single candidate, and the person who amasses the largest number of votes is declared the winner. If there is one thing that voting experts unanimously agree on, it is that plurality voting is a bad idea, or at least a badly outdated one. Ariel Procaccia is assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is co-founder of the not-for-profit websites RoboVote.org In fact, for centuries economists, mathematicians, political scientists, and more recently computer scientists have designed and studied better approaches to voting.