What is voting theory?

Voting theory, also called social choice theory, is the study of the design and evaulation of democratic voting methods (that's the activists' word; game theorists call them "voting mechanisms", engineers call them "electoral algorithms", and political scientists say "electoral formulas"). In other words, for a given list of candidates and voters, a voting method specifies a set of valid ways to fill out a ballot, and, given a valid ballot from each voter, produces an outcome.

(An "electoral system" includes a voting method, but also other implementation details, such as how the candidates and voters are validated, how often elections happen and for what offices, etc. "Voting system" is an ambiguous term that can refer to a full electoral system, just to the voting method, or even to the machinery for counting votes.)

Most voting theory limits itself to studying "democratic" voting methods. That typically has both empirical and normative implications. Empirically, "democratic" means:

There are many voters
There can be more than two candidates

In order to be considered "democratic", voting methods generally should meet various normative criteria as well. There are many possible such criteria, and on many of them theorists do not agree; but in general they do agree on this minimal set:

Anonymity; permuting the ballots does not change the probability of any election outcome.
Neutrality; permuting the candidates on all ballots does not change the probability of any election outcome.
Unanimity: If voters universally vote a preference for a given outcome over all others, that outcome is selected. (This is a weak criterion, and is implied by many other stronger ones; but those stronger ones are often disputed, while this one rarely is.)
Methods typically do not directly involve money changing hands or other enduring state-changes for individual voters. (There can be exceptions to this, but there are good reasons to want to understand "moneyless" elections.)

Why is voting theory important for rationalists?

First off, because democratic processes in the real world are important loci of power. That means that it's useful to understand the dynamics of the voting methods used in such real-world elections.

Second, because these real-world democratic processe...

Voting Theory Primer for Rationalists

Voting Theory Primer for Rationalists