Changing “The Vote”

A new history of voting through the ages is timely, says The New Yorker, as the U.K. prepares for electoral reform while the U.S. holds out against newer and fairer electoral methods. “Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present,” explains the bizarre electoral methods used by the Venetian aristocracy and the Vatican to choose their next leaders. The book sheds light onto one electoral change in our midst: the coalition U.K. government formed by the Liberal Democrats who demanded electoral reform from the Tory party. The article notes that with a different voting system, such as instant runoff voting, we would have been spared the Gore v. Bush election debacle.