Colloquy Podcast: A Nobel Prize-Winning Economist’s Proposal for Better Elections
In the wake of a long, bitter midterm election campaign, Americans are again left with a divided government and the prospect of two more years of partisan gridlock. Meanwhile, critical challenges like economic inequality, housing, healthcare, and the regulation of AI go unaddressed.
Eric Maskin, PhD ’76, Harvard’s Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics believes there is a better way. At a recent event hosted by the Harvard Griffin GSAS Office of Alumni Relations and moderated by Senior Director of Global Outreach Jennifer Flynn, Maskin proposed a range of creative, feasible reforms—from ranked-choice voting and ways to improve it to changes to the Electoral College and adoption of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—that can bridge ideological and partisan divides and restore hope for American democracy.
Eric Maskin is the Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard University. He has made contributions to game theory, contract theory, social choice theory, political economy, and other areas of economics. He received his AB and PhD from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge University. He was a faculty member at MIT from 1977 to 1984, Harvard from 1985 to 2000, and the Institute for Advanced Study from 2000 to 2011. He rejoined the Harvard faculty in 2012. In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (with L. Hurwicz and R. Myerson) for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory.
The following transcript has been edited and abridged for clarity and concision.
Jennifer Flynn: When I asked Professor Maskin how he came to study election reform, he said that, ultimately, economics is a science of choice and the decisions people make. Because some of the most important decisions involve whom we vote for, that led him to study the topic we will be discussing today. And now, I’m delighted to turn it over to Professor Maskin. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Eric Maskin: Thanks to GSAS for inviting me, and thanks to everyone who is joining online. I don’t think I’m making a controversial claim when I say that our country is badly polarized politically, to an extent that we really haven’t seen in living memory. The left demonizes the right, the right demonizes the left, and institutions like Congress have become largely dysfunctional.
I’m not going to say that reforming our voting system will cure this polarization problem, but we do know that a country’s voting system has profound effects on its politics—effects that may not be obvious on the surface. I think there’s a strong argument that improving the voting system can help a great deal with polarization. Let me explain why by going back to the 2024 presidential election.
You’ll recall that this was essentially an election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. I’ve omitted the minor-party candidates from the percentage totals, but you’ll remember that Trump narrowly won the popular vote. One thing that was notable about that election is that neither candidate was especially popular with the public. Polls in the summer of 2024 indicated that about two-thirds of voters were dissatisfied with both candidates.
Given that dissatisfaction, and given the great ideological distance between Harris and Trump, we might have hoped that someone like Joe Manchin would have run. There were others; Nikki Haley might have been another possibility. But Manchin, you’ll recall, was a Democratic senator from a red state, West Virginia. He strongly considered running as an independent. He created the No Labels party and did consider running.
From the standpoint of fighting polarization, this would have made a lot of sense, because Manchin appealed to both sides of the aisle. Polls actually showed that, in a head-to-head race against Trump, Manchin was likely to win, something like 52 to 48, because he would pick up Democratic support, a lot of independent support, and support from Republicans unhappy with Trump. Similarly, one-on-one against Harris, Manchin again would be likely to win, because this time he would get the backing of Republicans, independents, and Democrats who were dissatisfied with the Biden-Harris administration.
There were good reasons why Manchin would have made an excellent third-party candidate. But under our current voting system—and this seems almost like a paradox—Manchin would have finished dead last in a three-person race. The reason is that we use, at least in most states—I’ll come to the exceptions later—plurality rule, or first-past-the-post voting. Under this system, each voter votes for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins, even if that total falls short of a majority.
If Harris, Manchin, and Trump were all running, the polls at the time showed that we’d get a breakdown like the one indicated on the slide: Harris would get about 37 percent, Trump about 43 percent, and Manchin on the order of 20 percent. You might ask why this is so different from the head-to-head contests I described a few minutes ago. The first point is that independent candidates rarely do very well in American politics because voters don’t think they can win.
Democrats will vote for the Democratic candidate rather than throwing away their vote on a third-party candidate, and Republicans will do the same. Manchin might pick up, say, 20 percent, but that’s not nearly enough to win. If Manchin had run, the main significant effect of his candidacy probably would have been to make Trump’s victory even easier, because Manchin would be expected to take more votes away from Harris than from Trump.
So understandably, Manchin, I imagine, knew all of this, and in the end, he decided not to run. That was too bad from the standpoint of efforts to reduce polarization. Happily, there is a different, better voting system that would give Manchin a real chance. It’s called majority rule, and it goes by various other names, such as Condorcet voting and head-to-head voting.
Here’s how it works. If there are three candidates running—Harris, Manchin, and Trump—a voter registers three preferences. First, the voter decides whether she prefers Manchin or Harris and votes for one of them in that head-to-head contest. She then decides whether she prefers Manchin or Trump and votes in that head-to-head matchup. Finally, she decides whether she prefers Harris or Trump.
The voter makes three choices. Based on the head-to-head polls I mentioned earlier, we would expect the outcomes shown on the slide: Manchin wins his head-to-head contests and therefore becomes the winner of the majority-rule election. The rule is that the winner is the candidate who defeats all of his or her rivals head-to-head. So Manchin wins.
From the standpoint of reducing polarization, I think that’s a good idea. But it’s also a good idea based on some other important criteria. First of all, majority-rule voting ensures that whoever wins—in this case, Manchin—has majority support. In a democracy like ours, it’s hard to argue that candidate A should win if a majority of voters actually prefer B.
Majority rule ensures that if a majority prefers B, A won’t win. That’s true by the very definition of majority-rule voting, and it’s good for democracy. It’s also good for voters, because they tend to be more enthusiastic when the candidates they support are elected.
It’s also worth pointing out that under majority rule, we can’t have spoiler candidates. Many of you are old enough to remember the 2000 presidential election, when Ralph Nader spoiled the election for Al Gore. Everything came down to Florida. Gore would have beaten George W. Bush in Florida if Nader hadn’t been on the ballot, but Nader siphoned off nearly 100,000 votes that probably would have gone to Gore had Nader not been running.
Again, this kind of thing can’t happen under majority rule. We don’t get spoiler candidates. If Nader wants to run, that’s fine; there are no strategic worries about his candidacy. If Manchin wants to run, that’s fine. Spoilers cannot occur.
Majority rule ensures that if a majority prefers B, A won’t win. That’s true by the very definition of majority-rule voting, and it’s good for democracy. It’s also good for voters, because they tend to be more enthusiastic when the candidates they support are elected.
It’s also pretty clear that majority rule encourages a wider set of candidates to run. Under our standard plurality-rule system, Manchin wouldn’t run as a third-party candidate because he could forecast that he would do poorly. But he’d stand a real chance under majority rule, and that would encourage him and other strong candidates—candidates who would offer voters a wider choice—to throw their hats in the ring.
Another point is that majority rule is not gameable. If you’re a voter who prefers Manchin to Harris, you have no incentive to vote in a way that suggests you prefer Harris to Manchin. This is unlike every other voting system, in which there will be circumstances when you will want to vote strategically. Strategic voting does not occur under majority rule.
Coming back to the point I made at the outset, the majority winner really does make a good compromise in a polarized environment between two polar opposites. We expect the majority winner—the winner of the majority-voting contest—to be somewhere in the middle, between the two poles.
Many of you are probably familiar with other alternative voting systems. Two well-known systems are runoff voting, which is used to elect presidents in France and Brazil. It’s used by two American states, Georgia and Louisiana.
In runoff voting, everything in the first round is the same as in plurality rule: voters vote for one of the candidates. But if no candidate gets a majority in that first round, there’s a second round, a runoff, in which the top two face each other. In our example, Harris, Manchin, and Trump, Manchin would be eliminated in the first round, and Harris and Trump would face each other in the runoff. That suggests that runoff voting doesn’t do as good a job as majority rule at fighting polarization.
The same thing is true of ranked-choice voting. You may be familiar with ranked-choice voting because it’s been adopted in Maine and Alaska. It’s a pretty good system, but again, it’s not as good as majority rule because, in a three-candidate election, ranked-choice voting is essentially the same as runoff voting. So Manchin would be knocked out, even though he would win a majority head-to-head against the other two candidates.
An obvious practical question is how we can get something like majority rule adopted. I’m happy to say that it’s currently under consideration by the Ohio legislature. Senator Blessing, a Republican from Ohio, introduced majority rule in the Ohio state legislature. We’ll see what happens there. Several other states are considering similar legislation.
But probably the most promising way forward is not through legislatures but through ballot initiatives. The problem with going through the legislature is that, if you’re a state senator or state representative, you were elected under the old system. You’re probably not inclined to change the system if your position might be threatened. So putting the issue on the ballot for voters themselves to decide is probably the best way forward. That’s how Maine and Alaska adopted ranked-choice voting—through ballot initiatives. In principle, 24 states can do this.
The main struggle with ballot initiatives is that they require a lot of voter education. If you’re a voter, you may be skeptical—and justifiably so—about changing the voting system because it’s a very important institution. I need to convince you, first of all, that there’s a problem with the current voting system and that my proposed reform will solve that problem. That’s doable, but it requires a real investment in contacting voters.
I do want to mention one other direction for reform because it’s tied to majority rule: reform of the Electoral College. I probably don’t have to remind you that the Electoral College is deeply inequitable, in the sense that voters from different states have different power to affect the election outcome. If we believe in the principle of one voter, one vote, that’s blatantly violated by the Electoral College, where some voters effectively have more votes than others.
We would like to change the Electoral College for that reason. Furthermore, if we are going to conduct presidential elections using majority rule, we had better change the Electoral College system, because if we simply introduce majority rule at the presidential level without changing the Electoral College, we run the risk of having no winner at all.
Manchin would win some states, presumably. Trump would win some states. Harris would win some states. Quite possibly, none of them would reach the magic 270-electoral-vote mark. Then we’d have an election settled by the House of Representatives, which would be a very unsatisfactory resolution.
If we are going to use majority rule, which gives candidates like Manchin a real chance of winning particular states, we do need to change the Electoral College. The problem with changing the Electoral College, as I’m sure you know, is that it is written into the Constitution, and these days, changing the Constitution is essentially impossible. But there is an alternative way to use the popular vote, rather than the electoral vote, to determine the outcome of the election without changing the Constitution. It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Let me explain how it works.
It’s an agreement among states. A state can vote through its legislature to join, and if it joins, it pledges to award its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote if the compact takes effect.
When does it take effect? When the number of electoral votes among the member states reaches the magic 270 mark. At that point, the members of the compact have enough electoral votes that, if they put them all toward the winner of the national popular vote, that candidate will also get a majority in the Electoral College. It’s quite an ingenious method. Interestingly, we are currently not far from 270; we’re at 222.
The point I should mention, though, is that so far, the only members of the compact are blue and purple states. There are no red states at all. That’s understandable because, in 2000, the Democrats won the popular vote but lost the election in the Electoral College. The same thing happened in 2016. In other words, Republican states may feel that they’re benefiting from the Electoral College.
They don’t want to join the compact. Of course, their luck is going to run out at some point. Inevitably, there will be an election in which Republicans win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College. At that point, we may be able to adopt the compact. We would also want to reformulate it so that we define the popular-vote winner as the majority winner, not the plurality winner. That’s fairly straightforward.
Let me summarize what I’ve said. I hope I’ve made a reasonably persuasive argument that majority rule could do a lot to improve politics. We may not be able to introduce it at the presidential level at this point, given the problems with the Electoral College, but we can certainly do so at the congressional level, for senators and representatives. We can also do it at the state level, with governors’ races and the like. It should improve our politics.
Furthermore, it’s an achievable initiative because we already know from our experience with ranked-choice voting that reforms like this can be enacted through ballot initiatives. My view is that once a few states adopt it, we will pick up momentum and other states will want to follow suit. So I’m reasonably optimistic about the prospects for reform.
As for the Electoral College, I think we will reform it, ultimately. But as I said, we’re going to have to wait until the Republican Party loses an election in the Electoral College after winning the popular vote. We have to be a little more patient for that.
Anyway, thank you for listening, and I look forward to the question-and-answer period.
Jennifer Flynn: Thank you so much, Professor Maskin, for a thought-provoking presentation. We’ve got a lot of questions coming in from the audience. One that comes to mind, and that may bring together some of the themes you’ve discussed, is this: How would ranked-choice voting or majority-rule voting require voters to educate themselves differently? Particularly when there are many candidates on the ballot, does it become unwieldy for voters to understand all of the candidates’ positions and what they stand for? Right now, people vote mostly along party lines and for only one candidate. How would people need to educate themselves? And, relatedly, what about candidates? How would they need to market themselves differently to appeal to a majority instead of just to their party? What might they want to convey to express a broader range of policies so that people can rank their preferences accordingly?
Eric Maskin: The answer to the first question—whether voters need to educate themselves more under a system like majority rule or ranked-choice voting—can be found in our actual experience. We’ve used ranked-choice voting for quite some time in two states and more than 50 cities, so we know how voters behave.
Some voters behave just as they always have: They identify the candidate they like most and vote only for that candidate. They don’t bother with any of the others. But those voters are a minority. Most voters would like to express themselves more fully than simply saying, “Here is my favorite candidate.” If there are a dozen candidates running, very few voters will want to rank all 12, but many—a majority—will want to rank two, three, or four of them.
That turns out to be enough for the rankings to have a significant effect on the election. So yes, if you want to do more than vote for your favorite candidate, you will probably want to educate yourself more about the other candidates. But you don’t have to investigate all of them. It’s up to you; you can decide how many or how few candidates you want to evaluate and rank.
You also asked how candidates would need to appeal to voters, and we have answers to that, too. Because it is no longer enough to win a plurality—you have to win a majority—we find that candidates are much more likely to reach out to supporters of other candidates who share their political interests. That gives rise to much less negative advertising. Under the current system, the most vicious negative advertising tends to be between candidates who are actually quite similar because they are trying to distinguish themselves in voters’ eyes.
That incentive for negative advertising goes away under majority rule or ranked-choice voting because you want to make your candidacy attractive to the other candidate’s supporters. You’re not going to do that by trashing the other candidate; you’re going to do it by showing that you have policies in common. So we have seen changes in the way campaigns are organized in places where there has been voting reform.
Jennifer Flynn: Thank you. A follow-up question: Right now, candidates with more divergent or even extreme views get elected because they can clearly differentiate themselves from other candidates. That seems to discourage more moderate candidates because they might split the vote. How do ranked-choice voting and majority rule address this, in terms of depolarization and the quality of candidates? Is there a watering down of candidate quality in the current system—or would there be in a new system—if candidates are trying to appeal to a majority rather than along party lines?
Eric Maskin: I think the fact that, under majority rule, you need to attract a majority is actually likely to improve candidate quality. I return to my Joe Manchin example. In every election, we get third-party candidates, but they generally aren’t very plausible—candidates you could really see as senators, representatives, or president. Because majority rule gives third-party candidates a real chance of winning if they can attract a majority, we’re likely to see better candidates willing to run, such as Joe Manchin and Nikki Haley.
In our polarized environment, those candidates may well be moderates. There’s so much distance between left and right at this point that voters often want someone in the middle as a compromise. But that’s not necessarily the case.
If we go back to the twentieth century, the most radical president we had, I would argue, was Franklin Roosevelt. He was not a centrist; he was a radical. He introduced Social Security and a public-works program, and he did many things that were, to his opponents, outrageous at the time.
Nevertheless, he attracted enormous majorities. So being the majority winner is not necessarily a recipe for cautious, watered-down moderation. In Roosevelt’s case, it was quite the reverse. I would hope that if we introduce majority rule, it will inspire candidates with bold, exciting ideas to run so that, like Roosevelt, they can introduce radical reform.
Putting the issue on the ballot for voters themselves to decide is probably the best way forward. That’s how Maine and Alaska adopted ranked-choice voting—through ballot initiatives. In principle, 24 states can do this.
Jennifer Flynn: A question related to your answer is this: In a time of deep mistrust of government and politicians, how do you build trust in a new voting system without having one political party resist reform or claim that the new system is unfair to its party, or having voters claim that the system was manipulated in some way? How do you get these voting reforms adopted and build trust in a new system?
Eric Maskin: One way is through transparency. I talked about majority rule in a three-candidate election in part because, if that’s what we had, we could be just as transparent about majority rule as we are about plurality rule. Think about what happens on election night: You tune in to see what’s happening, and you see the various candidates’ current totals in each race.
In the version of majority rule that I presented today, you could do the same thing. In a presidential race, instead of one set of totals, you would have three: Manchin against Harris, Manchin against Trump, and Harris against Trump. All those numbers would be reported in real time, as they are now. There’s no reason to think that majority rule would inspire more doubt than our current system. Everything would be transparent and visible to voters in real time.
Jennifer Flynn: We have a number of questions seeking clarification about the number of candidates in a particular system. You gave an example with three candidates—Harris, Manchin, and Trump—and the three pairings: Harris against Manchin, Manchin against Trump, and Harris against Trump. Many questions are coming in about how the system works when there are five or six candidates, 10 candidates, or four or five pairings. There are many questions about the mathematical challenges. Even though we’ve touched on this, could you go a little deeper for people?
Eric Maskin: One reason I focused on the case of three, apart from its being the simplest case, is that it is the specific proposal being considered in Ohio at the moment. The idea is that there will first be a primary in which candidates from all parties can run—an all-party primary—and then the top three candidates will go to the general election. If a proposal like that gets through, there will be just three candidates in the general election, and dealing with four or more won’t be necessary.
What if we don’t have that system and anyone who gets enough signatures can be on the general-election ballot? Then we could have four, five, six, or even more candidates. In that case, it would be important for voters to rank candidates. If we’re comparing Manchin to Harris, we can tell whether a given voter prefers Manchin to Harris or Harris to Manchin by where those two candidates appear in the voter’s ranking.
With more than three candidates, the mechanism of majority rule would be exactly the same from the voter’s standpoint as in a ranked-choice voting election. Voters would rank as many candidates as they wanted. The difference would be that, rather than going through the instant-runoff process that ranked-choice voting entails, we would look for the candidate who beats all the others head-to-head. So how we determine the winner would differ, but from the voter’s point of view, it would be the same as in a ranked-choice voting election.
Jennifer Flynn: Thanks for that clarification. You mentioned Ohio several times during our conversation, and I know there’s legislation pending there to adopt majority rule. If it passes, what would be the knock-on effect, especially in red states? Ohio may be purple, but are there any examples of ranked-choice voting or majority rule working in red or very red states?
Eric Maskin: Alaska is at least mildly red. Its most popular politician, Lisa Murkowski, is a Republican, although admittedly a moderate Republican. Alaska may actually elect a Democratic senator this year, but it doesn’t do that very often. The state adopted ranked-choice voting successfully a few years ago and has now used it in two election cycles. Maine has been using ranked-choice voting since 2018, and polls indicate that voters there remain very happy with it.
I would expect other states, seeing this kind of success, to be interested in investigating voting reform as well. We’re already seeing that happen. Virginia, for example, is currently considering majority-rule voting, and California is doing so, too. At least three or four other states are in the early stages of considering that kind of voting reform.
Jennifer Flynn: Thank you so much. We have a couple of questions about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. What would prevent states that had signed the compact from later exiting when politicians in those states felt they would no longer benefit from majority rule? If that’s possible, wouldn’t it create instability from cycle to cycle?
There is a risk that a state that has joined will pull out. The compact includes a provision that a state cannot withdraw too close to an election; it has to give fair notice, which I believe is currently at least six months. That is a potential concern about the interstate compact, but don’t forget that states that join will enjoy many benefits.
For example, at the moment, in a presidential election, the only states that receive much attention from candidates or television coverage are the so-called battleground states because they will determine what happens in the Electoral College. If we moved to the interstate compact, every state could potentially be the focus of attention because every state would matter.
Even if you were in a red state and worried that belonging to the compact would hurt the Republican candidate, or in a blue state and worried that the compact might hurt the Democratic candidate, you would think twice about exiting, given the attention your state would receive from candidates, television, and other media. The voters in your state would actually make a difference to the outcome.
If we are going to use majority rule, which gives [majority-preferred] candidates . . . a real chance of winning particular states, we do need to change the Electoral College.
Jennifer Flynn: We have a question in the chat about the challenges of alternative voting systems. One challenge is that they take longer to tabulate final results. In Maine, it can take seven to 10 days; in California, final tabulations take a long time. Voters want quick results, and alternative systems may work against that. Are there ways to make sure that the Condorcet process moves more quickly?
Eric Maskin: This is another advantage of the three-candidate version of Condorcet. Remember, I said that if there are just three candidates, we can put the three head-to-head contests on the television screen in real time. There is no delay whatsoever. We will know who the winner is just as soon as we would in a plurality-rule race. Only when there are more than three candidates, requiring voters’ rankings, does it become more complicated to show the outcome.
I should distinguish between tabulation and presentation of the outcome. Tabulation can be done instantly. We have high-speed computers, so we can instantly find out who is ahead according to all the votes counted so far.
The problem is that it’s very difficult to show voters where things stand in a ranked-choice voting election because you would have to show all the different rankings and the percentages of voters corresponding to each. That’s why ranked-choice voting elections take a bit longer to produce results. It’s a presentational problem, not a vote-counting problem. If we use the three-candidate version—the Ohio version—we could get everything right away, or at least as quickly as we do now with plurality rule.
Jennifer Flynn: Thank you. Here’s a slightly more cynical question about the Electoral College and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: Is NPVIC a ruse to force Congress to pass a constitutional amendment? Obviously, changes to the Electoral College would need to go through Congress, so this may be a workaround. Could the compact’s flaws—including the possibility of reneging on the agreement and Commerce Clause issues—inject enough uncertainty to force Congress to act? Do you have any thoughts?
Eric Maskin: Of course, it would be great if Congress acted and tried to pass Electoral College reform itself. Perhaps the interstate compact will give Congress the impetus to do that. But I don’t see the compact as a ruse. Even if Congress doesn’t act, reaching 270 should be a good thing. I expect that states now being ignored in presidential elections will bask in the newfound attention they receive. So no, it’s not a ruse, but it could help get things done on the constitutional front.
Jennifer Flynn: There’s a question about voter education and civic responsibility. This person feels that educating people about civic responsibilities and opportunities is something that needs to be addressed in addition to election reform. Could you share some thoughts?
Eric Maskin: Yes, I agree that these days, voters may not have the same sense of individual responsibility to learn about candidates that was common 30 or 40 years ago. So many voters have been turned off by politics that they get involved in as minimal a way as possible. But here again is where education can make a big difference.
I mentioned that Maine adopted ranked-choice voting some years back. In fact, it adopted it in 2016. The state legislature vetoed it, and then voters adopted it through a ballot initiative a second time in 2018. The reason that worked was that many advocates of voting reform were out in the field—at shopping malls, street corners, and town halls—explaining to voters why they would benefit from the reform.
It seems to me that if we can enlist volunteers to explain voting reform to voters, we can also enlist volunteers to educate them about their choices in particular elections. In other words, we shouldn’t sit back and say that voters should educate themselves. We—the citizens who want educated voters—have a responsibility to go out there ourselves and help with the education process. We see that it works. It worked in Maine and Alaska, and it’s working in Ohio. We should do more of that, and I think we will.
Jennifer Flynn: So is that the path forward: more ballot initiatives and more citizens helping to educate other citizens? If that’s happening, over what time horizon would you expect voting reform to depolarize politics, especially given the commitments and beliefs of the pipeline of potential politicians and appointees? What does the future look like, and when could we reach a better future state?
Eric Maskin: I’m not a prognosticator. I’m an economist, and I don’t even try to predict the economic future. The political future is even harder to foresee. But I do know that voting reform can have a snowball effect. If, in the next few cycles, we get a few states—say, six or seven—to undertake serious voting reform, there’s a very good chance those efforts will catch fire and induce other states to do the same because states are very competitive with one another. If one state sees that another is doing something good, it has a strong incentive to imitate. I’m not going to give you a specific timeline, but there’s a reasonable chance that within a few election cycles, we will see a significant difference.
Jennifer Flynn: Great. I won’t put you on the spot any further, but if there were one charge you would like to give this audience—if we’re interested in changing voting and creating a more democratic system that reflects our preferences and views—what homework would you give the audience, or what resources would you point them to?
Eric Maskin: I would encourage people to get involved directly. I came to voting reform as an academic. I first studied it from an intellectual point of view, and it was very satisfying. But I eventually saw that ideas that had lived in the academic literature could be valuable in real politics, so I got involved. I joined a number of voting-reform advocacy groups. One is FairVote, based in Washington. Another is Rank the Vote, based in Massachusetts. The one I’m currently involved with most is Better Choices for Democracy, based in Austin, Texas.
I would encourage our listeners to look into joining those groups, too. They do make a difference. I’ve found the practical side of voting reform to be very engaging. I’m a professor, so I still like the academic side, but the practical side is interesting and worthwhile, and I commend it to our listeners.
