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Ismar Volić, Professor of Mathematics, Director of Institute for Mathematics and Democracy, Wellesley College

Ranked choice voting outperforms the winner-take-all system used to elect nearly every US politician

Ranked choice voting makes use of more information from the voters than plurality voting. stefanamer/Getty Images

American democracy is straining under countless pressures, many of them rooted in structural problems that go back to the nation’s founding. Chief among them is the “pick one” plurality voting system – also called winner-take-all – used to elect nearly all of the 520,000 government officials in the United States.

In this system, voters select one candidate, and the candidate who receives the highest number of votes wins.

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