[EL] "Overtime count"

[Hall, Adam]

Since Washington state has adopted many of these polices (though not RCV), I just want to point out that our Republican Secretary of State has been a good partner in successfully implementing the expansion of voting rights in our state at the same time that turnout has been increasing—all without sacrificing accuracy. The local media has also done a great job adapting our state’s new reality that the final count *will* be accurate, even if the outcome of the closest races isn’t known in time for the evening news on Election Night.

Best,

Adam Hall
Policy Counsel | Washington State Senate Democratic Caucus
Committees: State Government and Law & Justice
E: adam.hall at leg.wa.gov<mailto:adam.hall at leg.wa.gov> | O: (360) 786-7078 | C: (206) 450-3073
Gender Pronouns: He/him/his

[cid:image005.png at 01D5DD7B.3D970140]


From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> On Behalf Of Justin Riemer
Sent: Thursday, February 6, 2020 6:10 PM
To: Pedro Hernandez <pedro at fairvote.org>
Cc: Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: Re: [EL] "Overtime count"

The truth is these delays are all from policies pushed by Democrats and the party's lawyers. The push for ranked choice voting, election day registration, and vote-by-mail and challenges to ballot return deadlines, signature matching, cure periods, etc. are all protracting the time for the counting of ballots and getting an accurate count. Of course some of the same policies extend the actual election process forward several weeks as well. The various articles discussing the phenomenon fail to mention this point. I think it's actually reasonable for voters to expect a half-way decent count of the results on election night or the next day and that should be a valid consideration in assessing the wisdom of these policies. There are always going to be some issues to resolve in the days after the election to get final, accurate results but the scale of it is an avoidable problem.

J Justin Riemer



On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 2:06 PM Pedro Hernandez <pedro at fairvote.org<mailto:pedro at fairvote.org>> wrote:

RCV jurisdictions do release preliminary reports<https://sfelections.sfgov.org/june-5-2018-election-results-detailed-reports>, with not all votes counted. It’s been common practice in San Francisco that RCV tabulations are released each day by 4pm. Here's a link to a press release of the reporting schedule: https://sfelections.sfgov.org/article/department-elections-announces-results-reporting-schedule-june-5-election.



I’m a San Francisco voter, and the delay has everything to do with the factors in Ned’s piece: generous Vote-By-Mail laws -- about half of SF voters drop off their ballots on election day. Verifying, opening, and processing those ballots, well, takes time. California also has E+3, where ballots postmarked on election day and received by counties on Friday are counted.



In any close election, regardless of the election system used, finality can always be delayed due to overtime counting (ballot counting after election day).

Pedro Hernandez
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Senior Policy Coordinator, Voting Rights & Ranked Choice Voting
http://fairvote.org


On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 8:25 PM Kogan, Vladimir <kogan.18 at osu.edu<mailto:kogan.18 at osu.edu>> wrote:
Although Ned didn’t mention this in his piece, the “overtime count” issue will be particularly pronounced for jurisdictions using ranked-choice elections. Under RCV, there is no such thing as a partial count, since the late-return ballots could change which candidates are eliminated and in what order. You have to wait until all of the ballots to figure out who the top-two candidates are, and how many votes are redistributed to each.

[The Ohio State University]
Vladimir Kogan, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Political Science
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614/292-1146
http://u.osu.edu/kogan.18/
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