Samuel Baltz

In this picture of a cat staring up at a whiteboard filled with math, I identify with the cat. I often feel like a cat who is trying to do math.

Hi! I'm Samuel. I'm an election scientist. I work to improve and reform electoral institutions.

I'm the Research Director of GoodParty.org, where we help thousands of nonpartisan candidates and elected officials serve their communities. Before that, I spent a few years wandering the tunnels of MIT, where I was the Research Director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. I have a PhD in political science and scientific computing and an MS in applied math from the University of Michigan, and a BSc in astrophysics from the University of Toronto.

I use my expertise in political institutions and computational social science to improve and sustain democracy. I've advised local and regional governments on how to administer elections, and I've worked on the data team of several reform-oriented or social democratic organizations.

Before I meandered away from academic political science, I studied the interaction of election rules and voter behaviour using novel empirical and computational methods. I served as an editor of Nature's Scientific Data, and published some scribblings in PNAS, Political Analysis, Scientific Data, etc., which I still like to do from time to time.

NOTE TO FRIENDS 2025-08-08: If you know me in real life and are here because you're wondering what happened to me, my phone broke a few months ago. Email me!

Research:

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Last modified
2025 sometime