And a fiasco in New York - ranked voting

One way to ensure the election integrity of a vote is to make sure the process is simple and ballots are protected and counted ASAP and results are determined ASAP so unethical persons can not manipulate the ballots and the counting.

Here we has a fiasco in New York as they try their ranked voting system for the first time and they can't even get straight which ballots are the legal ballots. One of the candidates, Adams, had to point out the GLARING red flag when the BOE released the tally that had 135,000 "new votes" than the previous. What if the number of fake ballots had been smaller but enough to affect the outcome?

Latest New York mayoral count voided after ‘test’ ballots included in tally

NEW YORK — The New York City Board of Elections accidentally included results from a mock trial of the city's new ranked-choice voting system in unofficial primary returns released Tuesday — a snafu that threw the election process into chaos.

Tallies released Tuesday afternoon indicated that Kathryn Garcia had come within 2.2 points of leading Democratic candidate Eric Adams after ranked-choice tabulations were processed. But, shortly after the results were released, reporters and campaign staffers noticed there were roughly 135,000 more votes counted than those reported on election night.


Three hours after releasing the numbers, the Board of Elections issued a statement acknowledging a “discrepancy” and subsequently took down the totals from their website....

...
Maya Wiley, who on election night finished second to Adams in first-rank votes and remains a contender in the race, bemoaned the board's mistake and referenced its history of headline blunders.

"This error by the Board of Elections is not just failure to count votes properly today, it is the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed," she said in a statement. "Sadly it is impossible to be surprised."

The City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus said in its own statement Tuesday that the board’s mistake confirmed its worst fears about the rollout of the new system by an error-prone BOE, in one of the most consequential city elections in decades.

“Our members warned the public for months that the City was ill-prepared to execute elections under the new Ranked-Choice Voting system, and the concerns they raised continue to be borne out by the facts,” the group said. “Despite its year-long dithering in implementing Ranked-Choice, BOE still had several months and four separate RCV special elections for City Council this past winter and spring to ensure quality control by the time of the June primary, but has failed here to produce timely and accurate results.”
https://www.politico.com/states/new...after-including-test-results-in-tally-1387464

It's been over a week and election officials have had their hands on these ballots and they aren't even close to determining a winner.

When I vote, I get my blank ballot, I fill out my ballot, I walk to the machine and my ballot is tallied and that night we get results. No election officials touches my ballot before I put in through the machine which counts it.

As National Review put it.

"Residents of the world’s greatest city deserve better than this craziness, which may not be sorted out until mid July. Elections should be well-regulated, transparent, decisive, and as speedy as possible. Gothamites are instead dealing with an opaque, confusing, slow-moving monstrosity understood by almost nobody.

Other cities, and Maine, have implemented a similar system. Let them take note: RCV is proving to be a debacle for New York City. Some would argue that the New York City Board of Elections was never a synonym for competence in the first place. And that point is well taken. But the complexity of tabulating votes in this system clearly played a role in this bungle. Elections not only don’t need to be complicated, they shouldn’t be.

Republicans, it should be noted, had only two major candidates, and settled on one of them (Guardian Angels founder and talk-radio host Curtis Sliwa) without RCV, and the resulting delay will allow Sliwa to campaign for nearly a month while the Democrats are still fighting over the identity of their nominee."
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/new-york-citys-bonkers-mayoral-vote-count/

 

Sliwa may as well stand on his head for a month, NYC drank the blue Kool Aid looong ago....which ever space cadet Democrat takes the primary will take Gracie Mansion.

 

They did **** it up, but ranked choice voting is one way to loosen just a tiny bit the strangle hold the two party system has on the country and to encourage more people to vote.

Two reasons you will be against it

 

There is already skepticism in the election system and this screwing the one man that would probably be the best candidate, especially with the massive surge in crime, only makes people even more skeptic. If you don't fit the DNC narrative, odd how random votes appear to help the person you want.....

 

I do not have a horse in the race

 

However, you do. Maybe not in the particular race, but the system itself.

 

It feels like two issues are being conflated here. Clearly a major mistake was made by the Board of Elections but that could have happened regardless of the voting system they were implementing. If reads like some people (yourself included) are trying to use that error attack the particular voting system, which isn't justified. Plenty of places use versions of ranked choice voting and there isn't anything fundamentally wrong or difficult about it (though like any different system, it takes time and effort for people to get used to).

The UN will often step in and help countries that are unable to run their own elections effectively and securely. Maybe the US could consider that?

 

Ranked choice voting isn't necessarily the issue at play here. It's the "test ballots" that were added and then "removed" which shifted the results vastly towards Garcia.

With all the election hokeyness going on in the country, people are losing faith in the election system at an alarming rate.

 

Yes, but that error is being misused as a tool to attack the introduction of ranked choice voting.

And yet Americans appear to have no interest in the basic common sense solutions - investing much more in to the election system and completely removing partisan political interference by introducing truly independent electoral commissions with sufficient funding, authority and remit. Partisan politics is still far too dominant there.

 

It shows what happens when the election officials get to handle and manipulate ballots and the counting is made as complicated as possible. What if it had been only a thousand votes, not enough for the one candidate to notice and the margin 600 votes? And what plenty of places use ranked voting. What percent of jurisdictions use ranked voting.

It is conflated because when we already see how inept voting officials can be and then complicate it even more with ranked voting with ballots being handled and run over and over it is a disaster in the making. As I noted I vote as I have voted all my life and we never have these problems and delays and screwups.

And spare me the UN being competent at anything.

 

It's because of ranked voting that these incompetent officials continue to handle these ballots and have to rerun and rerun them.

 

The error had nothing to do with handling physical ballots. They had run a test on the tabulation software (which makes sense) but failed to clear down those test results before running the real results in (which was a stupid mistake). That kind of thing could happen regardless of the voting system. It can even happen with other kinds of computer system (as I've seen first hand).

Yes, it's the kind of error that could potentially impact the result but again, exactly the same is true regardless of the voting system.

Just keeping a "simple" voting system doesn't strike me as a reasonable response to incompetent election officials. As I said, the rational response would be to have a properly funded and truly independent electoral process. There is no reason why a modern country like the US can't handle slightly more complex voting systems like RCV. I'm actually surprised to see an American having such a negative opinion of your nations limitations.

Or you just never found out about them. You said yourself that if this error had involved a smaller number of votes, it may have gone unnoticed by anyone. How do you know that hasn't happened lots of times before?

 

Yea it does, they keep handling the ballots and running them through and they ran through test ballots by mistake, ballots that were use to test the calibration. Or did they? Even Diblasio is complaining about the incompetency and confusion and delay. And the simpler the system the less even incompetent can screw it up and we have our results without these delays.

 

These people want to run the national elections.

And when the rest of the country looks more like New York, which is what they want, and what has been gradually happening, what are things going to look like then?

 

Mate

Don’t know how you managed to stuff up a system Australia has been using for years!

 

No, you are still wrong. This is the statement explaining the error;

That is not about physical test ballot papers being run through the system again or in error, it was just about numbers in a computer. They ran an entirely valid test of the system at some point in the past but failed to clear down the results from that test in the tabulation system before the real ballots were run in. It should have started with zero votes in the system but it actually started with around 135,000. It's a very clear and simple mistake (which is all the more reason it shouldn't have happened but, ironically, all the more reason it can).

The fact remains that exactly the same kind of error could have happened regardless of the voting system they were using. Either way, there would have been a step after the testing where someone was meant to press the button to clear down the results in the tabulation system but for whatever reason that didn't happen.

 

That is not how ranked choice voting works. The ballots are not ran more than once. Where in the world did you get the idea they had to rerun them?

 

The other fact it is this showed how easy it is to spot big cases of fraud. While this was not fraud, it showed how clearly a large amount of extra votes stand out.

 

Yes it is and that is where the problems came it, they had already run them several times THEN these ballots got injected into the system and it was a CANDIDATE that caught all the new votes from the previous tallies. THAT'S when it was questioned how come this new tally has over 100,000 MORE votes than the previous.

 

It was caught, BY A CANDIDATE, because the results, the total ballots, jumped over 100,000 votes from the previous tally. And he asked how did the tally jump by 100,000. Doesn't even matter how. The confusion and the continued counting and handling of ballots whether hard copy or in a computer is causing these problems and people losing faith in the system. The more complicated and confused the more likely these incompetent poll workers will screw it up.

 

It's not me.

 

NO IT IS NOT. There is no reason to run them more than once. The scanner can pick up all of the ranked votes in one scan.

It was not previous tallies that were added it, it was test votes that were not purged as they should have been.

But it did highlight how easy it is to spot large mistakes, or large amounts of fraud.

 

There is really no overcoming wilful ignorance so I'll just have to leave you to wallow in your righteous indignation.

 

i.e. "I can't refute what you said so I'll just post an ad hominem and run"

Are you denying that it was Adam's who caught the miscounting by noting the total numbers of votes cast had increased by over 100,000 from the previous tally?

 

Why didn't those votes show up in the first tally?


NYC Primary: What is ranked choice voting?
"If a candidate gets a majority of votes (over 50%) they are declared the winner. However, if no candidate gets a majority of the vote:

• The last place candidate is eliminated, and their votes are parceled out to the voter's second choice.

• A new tally is conducted to determine whether any candidate has won a majority of the adjusted votes.

• The process is repeated until a candidate wins an outright majority and is declared the winner."

https://abc7ny.com/ranked-choice-voting-nyc-what-is-rank-the-vote-mayoral-candidates/10616887/

It didn't even dawn on the election officials that that NEW TALLY had the additional votes a CANDIDATE had to call attention to it.