How we can repair our democracy by rebuilding the mechanisms that power it What’s the best way to determine what most voters want when multiple candidates are running? What’s the fairest way to allocate legislative seats to different constituencies? What’s the least distorted way to draw voting districts? Not the way we do things now. Democracy is mathematical to its very foundations. Yet most of the methods in use are a historical grab bag of the shortsighted, the cynical, the innumerate, and the outright discriminatory. Making Democracy Count sheds new light on our electoral systems, revealing how a deeper understanding of their mathematics is the key to creating civic infrastructure that works for everyone. In this timely guide, Ismar Volić empowers us to use mathematical thinking as an objective, nonpartisan framework that rises above the noise and rancor of today’s divided public square. Examining our representative democracy using powerful clarifying concepts, Volić shows why our current voting system stifles political diversity, why the size of the House of Representatives contributes to its paralysis, why gerrymandering is a sinister instrument that entrenches partisanship and disenfranchisement, why the Electoral College must be rethought, and what can work better and why. Volić also discusses the legal and constitutional practicalities involved and proposes a road map for repairing the mathematical structures that undergird representative government. Making Democracy Count gives us the concrete knowledge and the confidence to advocate for a more just, equitable, and inclusive democracy.

Popular elections are at the heart of representative democracy. Thus, understanding the laws and practices that govern such elections is essential to understanding modern democracy. In this book, Cox views electoral laws as posing a variety of coordination problems that political forces must solve. Coordination problems - and with them the necessity of negotiating withdrawals, strategic voting, and other species of strategic coordination - arise in all electoral systems. This book employs a unified game-theoretic model to study strategic coordination worldwide and that relies primarily on constituency-level rather than national aggregate data in testing theoretical propositions about the effects of electoral laws. This book also considers not just what happens when political forces succeed in solving the coordination problems inherent in the electoral system they face but also what happens when they fail.

"A classic."—New York Times "Seminal, epochal, path-breaking . . . a Democracy in America for our times."—The Nation From the bestselling author of Bowling Alone, a landmark account of the secret of successful democracies Why do some democratic governments succeed and others fail? In a book that has received attention from policymakers and civic activists in America and around the world, acclaimed political scientist and bestselling author Robert Putnam and his collaborators offer empirical evidence for the importance of "civic community" in developing successful institutions. Their focus is on a unique experiment begun in 1970, when Italy created new governments for each of its regions. After spending two decades analyzing the efficacy of these governments in such fields as agriculture, housing, and healthcare, they reveal patterns of associationism, trust, and cooperation that facilitate good governance and economic prosperity. The result is a landmark book filled with crucial insights about how to make democracy work.

The updated edition of Steal This Vote—a rollicking history of US voter suppression and fraud from Jacksonian democracy to Citizens United and beyond. In Down for the Count, award-winning journalist Andrew Gumbel explores the tawdry history of elections in the United States. From Jim Crow to Tammany Hall to the Bush v. Gore Florida recount, it is a chronicle of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost, miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated up to the Supreme Court. Gumbel then uses this history to explain why America is now experiencing the biggest backslide in voting rights in more than a century. First published in 2005 as Steal This Vote, this thoroughly revised and updated edition reveals why America faces so much trouble running clean, transparent elections. And it demonstrates how the partisan battles now raging over voter IDs, campaign spending, and minority voting rights fit into a long, largely unspoken tradition of hostility to the very notion of representative democracy. Interviewing Democrats, Republicans, and a range of voting rights activists, Gumbel offers an engaging and accessible analysis of how our democratic integrity is so often corrupted by racism, money, and power. In an age of high-stakes electoral combat, billionaire-backed candidacies, and bottom-of-the-barrel campaigning, this book is more important than ever. “In a riveting and frightening account, Gumbel . . . traces election fraud in America from the 18th century to the present . . . [the issues he] so winningly addresses are crucial to the future of democracy.” —Publishers Weekly, on Steal This Vote

As featured in the documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction Named one of the Best Books of the Year by: Washington Post * Boston Globe * NPR* Bustle * BookRiot * New York Public Library From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, the startling--and timely--history of voter suppression in America, with a foreword by Senator Dick Durbin. In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice. Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.

For decades, journalists have called the winners of U.S. presidential elections—often in error—well before the closing of the polls. In Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t, Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-Hye Han investigate what motivates journalists to call elections before the votes have been tallied and, more importantly, what this and similar practices signal to the electorate about the value of voter participation. Jarvis and Han track how journalists have told the story of electoral participation during the last eighteen presidential elections, revealing how the portrayal of voters in the popular press has evolved over the last half century from that of mobilized partisan actors vital to electoral outcomes to that of pawns of political elites and captives of a flawed electoral system. The authors engage with experiments and focus groups to reveal the effects that these portrayals have on voters and share their findings in interviews with prominent journalists. Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t not only explores the failings of the media but also shows how the story of electoral participation might be told in ways that support both democratic and journalistic values. At a time when professional strategists are pressuring journalists to provide favorable coverage for their causes and candidates, this book invites academics, organizations, the press, and citizens alike to advocate for the voter’s place in the news.

What does the 2000 U.S. presidential election have in common with selecting a textbook for a calculus course in your department? Was Ralph Nader's influence on the election of George W. Bush greater than the now-famous chads? In Chaotic Elections!, Don Saari analyzes these questions, placing them in the larger context of voting systems in general. His analysis shows that the fundamental problems with the 2000 presidential election are not with the courts, recounts, or defective ballots, but are caused by the very way Americans vote for president. This expository book shows how mathematics can help to identify and characterize a disturbingly large number of paradoxical situations that result from the choice of a voting procedure. Moreover, rather than being able to dismiss them as anomalies, the likelihood of a dubious election result is surprisingly large. These consequences indicate that election outcomes--whether for president, the site of the next Olympics, the chair of a university department, or a prize winner--can differ from what the voters really wanted. They show that by using an inadequate voting procedure, we can, inadvertently, choose badly. To add to the difficulties, it turns out that the mathematical structures of voting admit several strategic opportunities, which are described. Finally, mathematics also helps identify positive results: By using mathematical symmetries, we can identify what the phrase ``what the voters really want'' might mean and obtain a unique voting method that satisfies these conditions. Saari's book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand not only what happened in the presidential election of 2000, but also how we can avoid similar problems from appearing anytime any group is making a choice using a voting procedure. Reading this book requires little more than high school mathematics and an interest in how the apparently simple situation of voting can lead to surprising paradoxes.

Voters today often desert a preferred candidate for a more viable second choice to avoid wasting their vote. Likewise, parties to a dispute often find themselves unable to agree on a fair division of contested goods. In Mathematics and Democracy, Steven Brams, a leading authority in the use of mathematics to design decision-making processes, shows how social-choice and game theory could make political and social institutions more democratic. Using mathematical analysis, he develops rigorous new procedures that enable voters to better express themselves and that allow disputants to divide goods more fairly. One of the procedures that Brams proposes is "approval voting," which allows voters to vote for as many candidates as they like or consider acceptable. There is no ranking, and the candidate with the most votes wins. The voter no longer has to consider whether a vote for a preferred but less popular candidate might be wasted. In the same vein, Brams puts forward new, more equitable procedures for resolving disputes over divisible and indivisible goods.

How we can repair our democracy by rebuilding the mechanisms that power it What’s the best way to determine what most voters want when multiple candidates are running? What’s the fairest way to allocate legislative seats to different constituencies? What’s the least distorted way to draw voting districts? Not the way we do things now. Democracy is mathematical to its very foundations. Yet most of the methods in use are a historical grab bag of the shortsighted, the cynical, the innumerate, and the outright discriminatory. Making Democracy Count sheds new light on our electoral systems, revealing how a deeper understanding of their mathematics is the key to creating civic infrastructure that works for everyone. In this timely guide, Ismar Volić empowers us to use mathematical thinking as an objective, nonpartisan framework that rises above the noise and rancor of today’s divided public square. Examining our representative democracy using powerful clarifying concepts, Volić shows why our current voting system stifles political diversity, why the size of the House of Representatives contributes to its paralysis, why gerrymandering is a sinister instrument that entrenches partisanship and disenfranchisement, why the Electoral College must be rethought, and what can work better and why. Volić also discusses the legal and constitutional practicalities involved and proposes a road map for repairing the mathematical structures that undergird representative government. Making Democracy Count gives us the concrete knowledge and the confidence to advocate for a more just, equitable, and inclusive democracy.

During the 2016 presidential election, America's election infrastructure was targeted by actors sponsored by the Russian government. Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy examines the challenges arising out of the 2016 federal election, assesses current technology and standards for voting, and recommends steps that the federal government, state and local governments, election administrators, and vendors of voting technology should take to improve the security of election infrastructure. In doing so, the report provides a vision of voting that is more secure, accessible, reliable, and verifiable.