The Mathematical Danger of Democratic Voting

Elections might seem like they produce results people want, but that isn’t always the case. This video describes the McKelvey-Schofield Chaos Theorem. To learn more, you can find the original explanation and proof of the theorem at 0:00 Transitivity 0:22 Voter Preferences 1:22 The Agenda-Setters 2:25 A Mathematical Approach 4:27 Choosing the Agenda *** Spanning Tree is an educational video series about computer science and mathematics. See more at To be notified when a new video is released, sign up for the Spanning Tree mailing list at Spanning Tree is created by Brian Yu. Email me at brian@ to suggest a future topic.