The problem of electing a set of representatives that stand for a given society is at the heart of any reasonable democracy. This problem has been discussed for ages, and social choice theorists have proposed dozens of voting methods, that all have their own merits and properties (but all suffer from the same paradoxes). There exist many voting rules. Yet, mainly the most simple ones like plurality or first-past-the-post are commonly used for crucial political elections (except in a few countries). Suppose that we change the voting rule for such high-stake political elections. What impact would it have on the voters’ behaviour and on the result of the election itself? This has been the main topic of two different experiments that have been carried out in France in 2017. The first one was run during the French presidential election and involved more than 40,000 voters that were asked to test alternative voting rules to elect the French president. The second one was run after the legislative election and aimed at using computer simulations to evaluate the impact of a reform of this election. In his talk, Sylvain Bouveret will use these two experiments to illustrate what happens when computational social choice theorists go out of the labs in the wild world of political elections.