[EL] (Not Really) ranked-choice voting in SF

[Rob Richie]

Note:

* Ireland just counted more than 1.7 million ballots in its presidential
election without much fuss, with 7 candidates and four rounds of counting
-- see the link in my blog I sent in my previous post. Took a day and a
half. St. Paul (MN) will do a hand count, if one is needed , in its current
city council elections with a ballot allowing 6 rankings (ballot will
notify voters of errors and get quick first choice results, but system
isn't certified to record rankings). Telluride, a small town in CO, will do
it for mayor this week too. Not ideal, necessarily, but doable.

* One of the major vendors (Dominion) has a system in certification that
allows 10 rankings, using a ballot design along the lines of the in
Portland that 95% of voters said they "fully undertood" in our early voting
"snapshot survey' that's linked from fairvote.org - Portland has 15 mayoral
candidates and 15 rankings. We've heard the Dominion system could be
certified early next year. Not only does it allow more rankings, but we
think it's easier for voters than the current Bay Area ballot design on
Dominion's current optical scan system (e.g, the old Sequoia one).

Rob Richie

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joehall at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 2:40 PM, David A. Holtzman <David at holtzmanlaw.com>
wrote:
>>
>> San Francisco’s hardware limitation of three rankings is a function of
the availability of equipment and the unwillingness of elections officials
to administer ballot counts conducted by hand.  Those problems, in turn,
are related to political unwillingness to invest public funds in upgrading
the actual machinery of democracy, compounded by regulatory barriers to
private sector entry into the election equipment market.
>
> Hmmm, this doesn't seem exactly right.  I may be misinterpreting your
> words. If so, please correct me!
>
> First, to run an IRV/RCV election using optical scanning technology,
> as it currently exists in elections, each "choice" in an IRV contest
> gets it's own space on the ballot (you essentially have an election
> for first ranking, an election for second ranking, etc.).  This is
> because current optical scanners can only reliably detect one kind of
> mark (which varies by vendor but is usallay an oval, square, rectangle
> or the wacky "broken arrow" scheme).  Current equipment cannot detect
> hand-written ranking numbers and no vendor has certified a system that
> uses a "matrix" style IRV/RCV ballot design (where each candidate is
> listed as a "row" and the rankings are "columns" and there can only be
> one choice per column, once per row or no choice).
>
> I'm not sure what the unwillingness to count by hand refers to.  Of
> course, each county in CA must perform the 1% manual tally per CA
> Elec. Code 15360, which is a count conducted by hand (and there is
> currently a statutory pilot program, on which advisory board I sit, to
> develop methods much more accurate and efficient than the 1% tally).
> Counting hundreds of thousands of IRV/RCV ballots with arbitrary
> numbers of rankings sounds like a total nightmare.
>
> best, Joe
>
> --
> Joseph Lorenzo Hall
> Postdoctoral Research Fellow
> Media, Culture and Communication
> New York University
> https://josephhall.org/
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>



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