The disaster that is the NYC mayor Democratic primary

[bmw]

Anybody here been following the mess in New York City? I have been only because I bet on the results, so I was one of the first in-the-know on this, but this might get some national attention tomorrow.

The short version is that the New York City election board had to withdraw the unofficial results it posted online today. They are using a new system approved on a ballot initiative known as ranked choice voting. So as a voter, you can actually vote for up to 5 candidates. In the NYC instance, there were 13 candidates. In-person voting was last week, and unofficial results were posted that night, but only 1st choice votes.

So fast-forward to today, and they posted unofficial results for how the vote re-allocations will play out (2nd through 5th choice votes). Each candidate gets eliminated in rounds and once eliminated, all the people who voted for that candidate have their ballots re-analyzed and then those people's 2nd choice (and eventually 3rd, 4th, and 5th) votes get re-allocated to those who haven't been eliminated. If that isn't confusing enough, they still have about 120,000 outstanding absentee ballots, so the results aren't even official yet.

The problem with today's results? 142,000 additional votes magically appeared out of thin air compared to last week's unofficial results. Turns out that some moron forgot to clear 142,000 "test" ballots out of the machine before counting. So the results, as posted, literally included 142,000 fake, arbitrarily made up votes.

[TC Talks]

I like the process, the Board of Elections sounds like train wreck.

Then, around 10:30 p.m., the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the statement said. The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.

The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched contest into a new period of uncertainty at a consequential moment for the city.

For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale. Skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process, though it is used successfully in other cities.

[bmw]

It's gonna look even worse when Garcia BARELY overtakes Adams in the final round of counting and vote re-allocation to win after absentee ballots are added to the mix.

On a side-note, I don't mind the concept of ranked choice, but they made their system WAY too convoluted. All you need on the ballot is 2 choices, not 5, and if nobody cracks 50% from first-choice ballots, then tally up all those second choice votes and add them to the results (and if it were me I would count the 2nd choice votes as half a vote). The current process of picking 5 and then eliminating candidates 1 and at a time and re-allocating votes over and over and over again (and in some instances "batch" eliminating multiple candidates who have no mathematical path to victory) is complicated enough for the bettors on PredictIt to figure out, let alone for the average voter.

[Rate This]

It's gonna look even worse when Garcia BARELY overtakes Adams in the final round of counting and vote re-allocation to win after absentee ballots are added to the mix.

On a side-note, I don't mind the concept of ranked choice, but they made their system WAY too convoluted. All you need on the ballot is 2 choices, not 5, and if nobody cracks 50% from first-choice ballots, then tally up all those second choice votes and add them to the results (and if it were me I would count the 2nd choice votes as half a vote). The current process of picking 5 and then eliminating candidates 1 and at a time and re-allocating votes over and over and over again (and in some instances "batch" eliminating multiple candidates who have no mathematical path to victory) is complicated enough for the bettors on PredictIt to figure out, let alone for the average voter.

Most of the other ranked choice systems use top 3 I believe.

[MotorCityRadioFreak]

Should only use two choices and be done with it.