Our results may also inform policymakers who are interested in promoting alternative voting rules but, in our experience, often hesitate because they are unsure how well citizens will understand and use them.

We believe this is a fundamental issue, as differences in understanding can lead to inequalities in voter empowerment.

Moreover, under majority judgment, better understanding of its vote aggregation is associated with more strategic voting.

We also observe no difference in voting behavior across the two systems: as predicted, evaluative voting leads to strategic use of extreme grades, while—contrary to theory—majority judgment does not reduce strategic voting.

We find that most participants understand how to use grades for each candidate under both systems. However, understanding of how votes are aggregated under majority judgment is lower and much more uneven. While some participants understand it well, many do not.

In this article, we study how well people understand alternative voting rules—specifically evaluative voting and majority judgment—using a lab experiment. We distinguish 3 levels of understanding: how to fill in a ballot, how votes are aggregated, and how to vote strategically.