[EL] RCV in Maine

Sat Oct 31 20:00:33 PDT 2020

Waiting for all ballots to come in before doing the ranked choice tally is
important for hand tallies, but not with scanned ballots where running a
ranked choice tally is essentially as easy as pushing a button.

It is a common approach in the California cities with RCV, for example, to
run RCV tallies on election night two or three times, and then once a day
until ballot scanning is finished.

This year, Maine should have more than 90% of its ballots centrally scanned
within two or three days of the election, and it would be a very meaningful
- and straightforward - exercise to see what  the instant runoff tally is
at that time. Of course the final tally would remain determinative.

FairVote just released a  SurveyUSA poll of the state of the Maine RCV
races this week, and presents its findings in a nifty interactive format at
this webpage:
https://www.fairvote.org/maine_poll_october2020

On election night, we will be able to use that data and historic voting
patterns to do a forecast of what the instant runoff results might be when
all the ballots are counted. It’ll be posted at fairvote.org

Notably, ranked choice voting in our survey had no effect on the margin in
the presidential race in a second congressional district for the one
electoral vote to be decided there. Major party candidates are affected by
ranked voting tallies based on the nature of the voters backing the
third-party independent candidate along with their willingness to engage
with the concerns of those voters.

It will be a helpful contrast to show how many votes are preserved in the
instant runoff tally in the US Senate race in Maine compared to the huge
drop in turnout we can be sure to see in Georgia when it has its US Senate
runoff in January. Voting in Georgia is hard enough without having to ask
people repeatedly to come back to cast ballots instead of just offering
them a chance to provide their back up choices with a ranked ballot.

Rob

On Saturday, October 31, 2020, Kogan, Vladimir <kogan.18 at osu.edu> wrote:

> I wanted to push back a little on Rick’s comments regarding RCV in Maine
> and the plan to wait until all towns get their votes in before tabulating
> the second round votes. Rick wrote: “This delay is not at all intrinsic to
> RCV. That process can be completed quickly, if not for the Secretary of
> State’s policy choice in Maine to wait in this way.”
>
>
>
> I actually do think this approach *is* intrinsic to RCV. We could imagine
> that in a really close, multi-candidate election (e.g., a San Francisco
> mayoral election with nearly 20 candidates running), it may not be clear
> who the lowest voter-getter will be until all of the votes have been
> counted. Without knowing who came in last, we would not know who to
> eliminate first and whose first-round votes to redistribute. And even if
> the lowest vote-getter is clear, the differences in the vote counts of
> other candidates could also be closed, determining the order in which they
> are eliminated.
>
>
>
> Of course, there will likely be little doubt that Savage ultimately comes
> in last in this particular election, but we could imagine different
> elections with different mixes of candidates playing out differently.
> Waiting until all of the votes are is the only prudent general policy that
> can work for all elections under RCV, it seems to me.
>
>
>
> Vlad
>
>
> Why Maine’s Senate Race Will Likely Not Be Officially Resolved Until A
> Week or so After Nov. 3rd
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/electionlawblog.org/?p=117884__;!!KGKeukY!g5VJxhRKE5d0Ae9rE5g2RgmGMk2dkXyww6FjmoO7mkPC7Rq7320IVTbOORLWydvT$>
>
> Posted on October 31, 2020 8:32 am
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/electionlawblog.org/?p=117884__;!!KGKeukY!g5VJxhRKE5d0Ae9rE5g2RgmGMk2dkXyww6FjmoO7mkPC7Rq7320IVTbOORLWydvT$>
>  by *Richard Pildes*
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/electionlawblog.org/?author=7__;!!KGKeukY!g5VJxhRKE5d0Ae9rE5g2RgmGMk2dkXyww6FjmoO7mkPC7Rq7320IVTbOOanDP0lu$>
>
> Maine’s Senate race is considered close
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.politico.com/news/2020/10/30/the-independent-that-could-decide-the-senate-433629__;!!KGKeukY!g5VJxhRKE5d0Ae9rE5g2RgmGMk2dkXyww6FjmoO7mkPC7Rq7320IVTbOOVVrBUvP$>,
> and if so, there’s an additional reason it could take longer — maybe
> several days — to determine who has won. The reason is that Maine now uses
> ranked-choice voting (RCV), and there is an independent, Green New Deal
> candidate, Lisa Savage, polling
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.fairvote.org/maine_poll_october2020__;!!KGKeukY!g5VJxhRKE5d0Ae9rE5g2RgmGMk2dkXyww6FjmoO7mkPC7Rq7320IVTbOOQQKh1uk$> in
> the 4-5% range. If the margin between Susan Collins and her Democratic
> opponent, Sara Gideon is less than that when the initial count is
> completed, the Senate outcome would then be determined in the second round
> of the ranked-choice tabulating process, when Savage will be eliminated and
> the second-ranked choices on those ballots will be distributed either to
> Collins or Gideon.
>
> The assumption is that most of Savage’s voters will rank Gideon as their
> second choice, since Savage is the furthest left candidate in the race. But
> Maine has structured that process, as I understand it, so that it won’t get
> to that next stage for nearly a week. I’ve been told (maybe someone has a
> story to link to for this) that the Secretary of State will not turn to the
> second round until the vote totals from every town in the state are in;
> since small towns take several days to finish completing that count, that
> means the RCV process won’t start until the slowest town has finished
> completing its tallies.
>
> This delay is not at all intrinsic to RCV. That process can be completed
> quickly, if not for the Secretary of State’s policy choice in Maine to wait
> in this way.
>
>
>

-- 
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