Across America, news sites, state legislatures, and school board meetings have recently been inflamed with controversy over whether or not schools should teach critical race theory. Most of this discussion on both sides of America’s bipartisan divide has taken place without a good definition of what critical race theory is, or coming to terms with what it means to teach critical race theory.

For my own part, I am tired of repeating similar explanations every time the topic comes up, and the topic isn’t going away any time soon… so here I am writing it down in one place for…

There are many credible alternatives to plurality voting. Of those, the simplest is approval voting, which has support from both prominent voting theorists as well as activists who advocate for voting reforms.

The way approval voting works is simple: A voter considers a list of candidates, and either approves or disapproves of each candidate. Usually, approving of a candidate means marking the bubble next to their name, while disapproving a candidate means leaving the bubble blank. The candidate with the largest number of voters behind them wins.

There are two main drawbacks of approval voting. The first is that it…

One of the most common voting systems in use is the plurality vote. Plurality votes play a key role in most modern democracies. When there are more than two options, however, a plurality vote is deeply flawed. Most notably, a plurality vote with multiple candidates is highly vulnerable to spoiler effects, “center squeeze” effects, and can elect candidates who would lose against any other candidate in a head-to-head contest.

Plurality voting is nevertheless widespread, and has been around for a very long time. For example, the classical Athenian practice of ostracism was carried out using a plurality vote. Each voter…

Biden won about 500 counties. Trump won about 2400. It’s a striking statistic that boils down to two distinct facts. First, “county” doesn’t mean the same thing in different states. Second, even within the same state, counties are very far from equal.

Red states have more counties

In general, the largest numbers of counties are found in the southeastern states and the Midwest. Northeastern and western states have the fewest counties. This geographic pattern happens — coincidentally — to align with current regional divides in politics.

Counties in western states were usually formed when the states were very sparsely populated. It’s hard to justify a…

In 2008 and 2010, California voters went to the ballot box and voted on three electoral reform measures. The reformers won all three ballots.

• Proposition 11 established the California Citizens Redistricting Commission (CCRC) and gave it the power to draw legislative districts.
• Proposition 14 established the top-two primary system.
• Proposition 20 expanded the CCRC’s mandate to include Congressional maps.

The most prominent supporter of all elements of this reform package was Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a non-traditional Republican who had been initially elected in a way that bypassed the normal primary process. As noted above, these reforms were passed into law…

This May 4th, I decided to put the Thrawn trilogy in my reading queue. I’ve read them before, but the last time was sometime before Disney put out The Last Jedi. Once upon a time, as a young Star Wars fan, I thought that the prequels had completely overturned a lot in Star Wars novels written before The Phantom Menace.

Now that I’ve finished re-reading Heir to the Empire, I’m left thinking that I really didn’t have the proper perspective at the time. In broad strokes, I think the Thrawn trilogy fits better with the prequels than the Disney sequels…

In some ways, the field of voting theory can be seen as having been shaped by two French mathematicians (Jean Charles de Borda and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat). The course of modern voting theory can largely be explained in terms of two theorems published in the 1950s by two Kenneths: The positive result of Kenneth May, and the negative result of Kenneth Arrow.

May’s theorem

May’s theorem, published in 1952, is simple and straightforward, which is why it is often overlooked. It can be described as follows:

If a voting system for deciding between two options always produces a winner…

Nathanial Rakich and Lauren Bronner recently published a feature titled Advantage, GOP on FiveThirtyEight. The thesis of the piece is that the deck is stacked in favor of the Republican Party. This is a dangerously wrong simplification, and it exaggerates the degree to which the system is undemocratically stacked in favor of the GOP.

And it’s not just the Senate — the Electoral College, the House of Representatives and state legislatures are all tilted in favor of the GOP.

It is dangerous for two reasons. Democrats are given a reason to discount elections as illegitimate and disengage from the democratic…