instant-runoff voting

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Primer uses simulations to compare voting systems such as first-past-the-post, approval, ranked choice and others. It shows how each system behaves and can be manipulated, with links to further voting theory resources.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on US voting machines, covering how they work, their security weaknesses, and how elections could be made more secure.

A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on voting access in the US, covering how some states are making voting less equal. It is a comedic news commentary piece.

CGP Grey explains the Single Transferable Vote, a proportional ranked-ballot system, and why politicians have little incentive to adopt it. It is a short animated explainer of how multi-winner ranked voting works.

A Google Tech Talk by Steve Weis that introduces modern cryptography and its use in practice and at Google. It covers proofs of security and security definitions and a special topic. HN commenters treat it as a talk on verifiable electronic voting.

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.

Veritasium explains why no voting system can be perfectly fair, drawing on Arrow's theorem and the work of Eric Maskin. It looks at problems with systems like first-past-the-post and ranked-choice voting.

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 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 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.

Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.

A Last Week Tonight segment on how century-old Supreme Court decisions left U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa without meaningful representation. It mixes comedy with a history of their legal status.

A Last Week Tonight episode segment in which John Oliver explains gerrymandering, how lawmakers reshape voting districts to shift political power. It uses humor and examples such as oddly shaped districts.

A short upload of the classic ICQ notification sounds, such as the 'uh-oh' message alert.

A four-minute clip of George Carlin arguing that voting is a way of keeping people in a distracted bubble, and that non-voters have as much right to complain as anyone.

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.

A five-minute animated explainer of liquid democracy, in which voters can delegate their vote to trusted people. It starts from the origins of democracy and contrasts direct and representative models.

A 1980 clip of conservative strategist Paul Weyrich telling a religious audience he does not want everybody to vote. He says elections are not won by a majority and that leverage rises as turnout falls.

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.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

James D'Angelo argues that the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act made congressional votes public, opening the door to lobbyists and special interests. He proposes restoring secret voting as a cheap fix for corruption and many social ills.

Scott Wlaschin's NDC talk on using statically typed functional programming, F# in particular, to model a business domain. Types are used to represent the domain precisely and to encode business rules so that illegal states cannot be built, with the compiler acting as an instant unit test.

Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente explains immutable and persistent data structures in C++ and how they support value semantics. He presents the Immer library, rrb-trees, and a prototype text editor that opens a huge file instantly.

Scott Wlaschin shows how statically typed functional languages, using F# examples, can model a business domain so that invalid states cannot be represented. The type system acts almost like an instant unit test at compile time.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 18 talk argues that privacy threats have shifted from centralized state databases like TIA to corporate data collection by companies like Google, despite wins in strong cryptography and decentralization.

A five-minute demo of a live ClojureScript game editor by Chris Granger. It is based on Bret Victor's demo from the Inventing on Principle talk, with code changes reflected instantly in the running game.

James Hoffmann runs caffeine analyzer tests comparing filter versus espresso, extraction over time, steep time, instant coffee and light versus dark roast.

A Fox News segment in which Ami Horowitz interviews people at UC Berkeley and in Harlem about whether voter ID laws are racist.

Short footage from a NASA space suit test in which a technician is exposed to near-vacuum after an accidental depressurization. It shows the instantaneous effects on a human body.

Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek present their DEF CON 23 talk on remotely compromising an unmodified Jeep, pivoting from the entertainment system to the vehicle's internal networks to send control messages. They aim to show the reality of car hacking.

Grandmaster David Howell tests Magnus Carlsen by showing him chess positions and asking which famous games they come from. Carlsen recognizes many almost instantly.

A roughly three-minute Onion News Network satire in which a host consoles a severely depressed zoologist who spent his whole life studying anteaters. It is a short comedy sketch about wasted effort and misplaced obsession.