The mathematical attention to voting systems has come in waves: the first wave was bound up with the development of probability, the second wave was axiomatic, and the third wave is computational. There are many beautiful results giving guarantees and obstructions when it comes to the provable properties of systems of election. But the axioms and objectives from this body of work are not a great match for the practical challenges of 21st century democracy. I will discuss ideas for bringing the tools of modeling and computation into closer conversation with the concerns of policymakers and reformers in the voting rights sphere. In particular, I’ll take a close look at ranked choice voting (or, as Politico recently called it, “the hottest political reform of the moment”).