Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation [J0374]

2024 HCDJ in Gift-Worthy condition. 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. 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.

From recent-ish Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Great book on the math behind voting systems"; "Very eye-opening look at the democratic process in the US and its severe shortcomings (including math-based alternative options)."; "A fun and engaging read - both for its accessible and robust engagement with the mathematics of voting systems and its wide variety of hypothetical and actual examples. The book overall makes a very strong and well-supported case for improving the electoral process in terms of both voting structures and civic literacy and engagement, and shows how these measures would be intertwined and mutually reinforcing."; "This is a great book to understand the math behind voting issues like ranked choice voting, how apportionment works, and gerrymandering. It's geeky but I'm a nerd so I really like it."