I recently read a brief interview with Vicki Abeles, the director of the documentary Counted Out, to be released in 2025. Counted Out explains how mathematics plays a central role in many current issues—from how democracies and elections are run to complex systems such as the healthcare industry and data collection or modeling of weather and climate—yet can be a gatekeeper to success and enfranchisement for the general population, many of whom struggle to understand or outright fear the subject.
I was simultaneously deeply excited about and frustrated by this interview and documentary. It’s great that someone is bringing to light some of the major disparities we face in mathematics education, but it’s also very upsetting to me that these disparities still exist. This is all the more apparent to me as November 5th approaches, where both political parties are expecting (and in many cases promising) challenges to counting the votes and certifying the election results.
The interview looks at how many aspects of the election system in the United States allow for nefarious uses of mathematics, which has been used throughout the country’s history to disenfranchise voters. With the Electoral College in place, it is possible for a presidential candidate to win the race despite winning only around 23 percent of the popular vote if they get enough razor-thin majorities in the right states. And since state legislators are granted the power to redraw voting districts every 10 years, gerrymandering allows for the splintering of opposition voting blocs in order to maximize wins by the party in power.
A gerrymandering case brought to the Supreme Court in 2017 was the first time in which election mathematics featured prominently in an argument to obtain a fairer district map. Multiple Supreme Court justices — both liberal and conservative — decried the arguments based on this mathematical efficiency gap as “gobbledygook,” and refused to side with that camp since they didn’t think the public would understand.
But why exactly does the public generally not understand mathematics? It’s a hard subject, as all of us know, but I’d strongly argue that mathematics education has long been insufficient. The Supreme Court ruled segregated schooling to be legal in 1896, which led to decades of massive gaps among racial groups in learning core subjects like mathematics. This gap continues today, as people who lack access to a good math education are kept out of the higher-paying jobs, allowing discrimination to persist.
Moreover, the voting population’s perspective can become dismissive whenever mathematics comes up in political debate. The general public was bored by Al Gore’s debate performances against George W. Bush, even though his answers reflected a solid mathematical understanding of many key aspects of government (the Electoral College and the Supreme Court also doomed Gore’s 2000 election prospects).
More recently, a majority of voters believe Donald Trump will handle immigration better than Kamala Harris. But my question is: how can Trump and his advisers consistently promise to deport 20 million undocumented immigrants when the estimated number of such immigrants residing in the country is much lower, around 11 million? I don’t understand how these basic mathematical errors (not to mention the serious human rights abuses they entail) give people a sense that this candidate understands the issue, other than the tendency for people to tune out math whenever it comes up in conversation. Trump’s plans to pay for such mass deportations by, for instance, defunding the Department of Education would further harm the issue of mathematics education.
Both Harris and Trump speak a lot about their ability to help America thrive but haven’t focused much on education reform. I hope that the country starts valuing education more seriously as a pathway to continue American prosperity, giving future generations the necessary tools to turn into innovators and leaders. Hopefully, this increased understanding of mathematics will engender reforms in the voting process so that no one is counted out any longer.
