election manipulation

CGP Grey explains how the 2015 UK general election showed the flaws of first-past-the-post voting, with parties like UKIP winning many votes but few seats.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines scatter plots that were claimed to show fraudulent vote-switching in Michigan's 2020 election. He recreates the analysis and shows that the pattern arises from comparing percentages across different bases, not from fraud.

AlphaPhoenix uses Monte Carlo simulation and annealing-style methods to draw North Carolina congressional district maps, both gerrymandered and fair. He focuses on the fascinating computational problem rather than the politics.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines the Texas Supreme Court filing claiming Biden's 2020 win had a one-in-a-quadrillion chance. He walks through why the statistical argument is flawed.

Matt Parker examines claims that Biden's 2020 vote counts violate Benford's Law, explaining the law and why it often does not apply to precinct-level election data.

A Vox explainer from the 2020 election series on why American public transit is so poor. It traces the effect of the interstate highway system on cities and the resulting car dependence.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day investigates manipulation on Facebook, interviewing the company's team about content moderation. It is the third video in his series on social media manipulation.

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

A short CGP Grey explainer on the alternative vote (instant runoff voting) versus first past the post, made around the 2011 UK referendum. It shows how ranked ballots are tallied and why they avoid spoiler effects.

Numberphile interviews cryptographer Ron Rivest about end-to-end verifiable voting. He explains how homomorphic encryption and receipts let a voter confirm their ballot was counted without being able to prove how they voted to anyone else.

CGP Grey explains Mixed-Member Proportional representation, the system used in New Zealand where voters get two votes. It covers how it differs from first-past-the-post.

Part 1 of Smarter Every Day's three-part series on manipulating the YouTube algorithm. It features Renee DiResta and examples of how social media platforms can be manipulated.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day examines how bad actors and bots use Twitter, drawing on the released Russian IRA dataset and interviews. It asks why interactions on the platform turn hostile.

The Center for Election Science explains favorite betrayal in instant-runoff voting: in some elections, ranking your favorite first can cause your least favorite to win. It contrasts this with plurality voting's spoiler problem.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

An animated simulation comparing single-winner voting methods such as plurality, instant runoff and STAR. Colored regions show which candidate wins as a randomized electorate shifts across a two-dimensional political space, building on Ka-Ping Yee's earlier diagrams.

A short CGP Grey animation showing how the US electoral college lets a candidate win the presidency with as little as about 22 percent of the popular vote. It lays out the arithmetic of winning states by narrow margins.

Kurzgesagt explains how the European Union is governed, how its officials are elected or appointed, and whether a citizen's vote actually matters.

A six-minute explainer from Undefined Behavior on range (score) voting. It follows an earlier video on Arrow's Theorem and shows how range voting seems to satisfy the criteria Arrow's Theorem says no ranked system can.

A short CGP Grey bonus video explaining the shortest-splitline algorithm, which draws electoral districts by repeatedly splitting a state along its shortest dividing line while balancing population. It is offered as a neutral, algorithmic fix for gerrymandering.

Veritasium visits Richard Lenski's lab to explain the decades-long E. coli evolution experiment, which asks how repeatable evolution is and shows bacteria evolving to use a new food source.

CGP Grey explains first-past-the-post voting and why it pushes elections toward two dominant parties. It is the first in his series on electoral systems.

CGP Grey explains jury nullification, a juror's power to acquit despite the law, and why mentioning it can get you struck from jury selection.

Veritasium explains how cosmic rays and other particles flip bits in computer memory, with examples including a Belgian election count error, plane incidents and game glitches. It is inspired by a RadioLab episode on bit flips.