Dear friends,
I appreciate all of the comments and questions from you about the administration of the June primary elections. Glenn Ribotsky explained the importance of a problematic Board of Elections regulation:
[P]art of this Board of Elections debacle is due to the ridiculously outdated regulation that absentee ballots cannot begin to be counted until after Election Day — and because NY State lets you cast an in person ballot even if you sent in an absentee one, in which case the latter is tossed.
But apparently, the system for noticing if an in-person ballot has been cast by the same person as an absentee one, which should involve an immediate computer match when counting is done on Election Day — does not. So there are hand/eyeball counts, which further delay things.
Last November, State Senator Michael Gianaris drafted a bill to allow
absentee ballots to be validated and canvassed before the close of polls on Election Day. . . . In New York City, the amount of absentee ballots increased tenfold compared to recent elections. Six weeks after the [June 2020] primary, two congressional races remained undecided and vast numbers of ballots had yet to be counted.
In the November 2020 election, NY voters had the opportunity to ‘cure’ ballots with “small errors such as missing signatures or unsealed envelopes.” Gianaris noted:
“We are the latest state in the country to tabulate results. Thank God we are not a swing state because otherwise this would be a national scandal.”
Gianaris’s bill also called for a change in the policy favoring in-person voting. Had it passed in time, it would have required voter records at polling sites to indicate if an absentee ballot had been sent to a voter. If a voter had been mailed a ballot, they would only be able to vote in person by affidavit, reducing the difficulty and time required to identify people who cast ballots as absentees and in person.
“We definitely are an odd state in that we allow voters to vote in person even if they sent an absentee ballot back in already,” said Jennifer Wilson, deputy director of the League of Women Voters in New York State.
The reforms were not made in time; the legislation will be effective January 1, 2022. And that’s why we’re waiting. Let’s not make the same mistake again.
Call on your state representative to consider A05691, a bill to reform the BOE. Here’s a ready-made message!
Another work-from-homer asked the question that had been plaguing me:
If the RCV process eliminates the candidate in last place and redistributes their votes, how can the process even begin before all votes (including absentees) have been registered?
Here’s a fun fact: Our maybe (?) new comptroller, Brad Lander, introduced a bill last fall in the city council that
would require the New York City Board of Elections to publish the unofficial tally of election results for ranked choice voting (RCV) elections in the form of round-by-round tallies, tabulated pursuant to the RCV tabulation procedures of the Charter. This would ensure that the unofficial results are reported in the same format as the final results. It is designed to add transparency to the RCV tabulation process and give voters confidence in the legitimacy of RCV election results.
Because partial results are always potentially misleading and RCV tallying is computerized (and thus, fast), Lander made the case that we should see the round-by-round tallies from the beginning. This would have meant that on election night (or the next morning), we would have seen Adams, Wiley, and Garcia in the 1, 2, and 3 spots AND the round-by-round tallies that left Adams and Garcia in the 1 and 2 spots, with Wiley close behind.
Make election results transparent. Show the process of counting a ranked choice voting election when reporting election results will help voters understand how the winner is determined and build confidence in the voting system.
When reporting results, show the winner before explaining the counting process.
First, describe what happens in each round, then follow with a visual display.
Show all rounds of counting. Include vote totals for each candidate, the number of votes removed or added, the number of inactive ballots, and a “goal line” for the winners.
Make it easy to see the number of votes transferred to each candidate during each round.
Show inactive ballots in the results list. Differentiate inactive ballots from the active candidates.
Make it easy for users to navigate both forward and back to see the process of counting.
To my delight, the good people at the Center for Civic Design provide a real, NYC illustration!
Page through the RCV results in the 2021 special election to fill the council seat for District 31. It’s very clear how it worked!
So, to the question of how RCV can begin without all the ballots: it’s a lot of math that has to be redone from new totals AND computers can do that quite fast. Just as partial results are always interesting and potentially misleading, seeing the first-choice results for 83% of the votes is indicative of how it might end. And seeing the RCV for 83% of the vote is more indicative of how it’s likely to end.
Did everybody learn something today?! I hope so.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the majority had done violence to the Voting Rights Act, a civil rights landmark.
“Wherever it can, the majority gives a cramped reading to broad language,” she wrote. “And then it uses that reading to uphold two election laws from Arizona that discriminate against minority voters.”
Justice Kagan said the court’s action was a devastating blow to the nation’s ideals.
“What is tragic here,” she wrote, “is that the court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.’”
Today, I left a message for Chuck Schumer to remind him that the For the People Act is necessary legislation. We can’t stand by and watch as fellow citizens are denied their voting rights.
Call Schumer’s offices (any or all of them!) today to remind him that S1 must pass.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to talk to the recording device about climate change. A town 80 miles north of the US/Canada border has been obliterated by a wildfire. Apparently, our legislators are too busy doing ExxonMobil’s bidding.
There has been a frightening spike in heat-related deaths, and stupidity refuses to take a holiday.
Incredibly, the LAPD caused a major explosion by detonating fireworks they had confiscated from residents in South LA. They detonated them in an iron container on a residential street. The container exploded and windows were blown out, cars flipped, and people were injured. Really? Yes.
Get some rest and enjoy the long weekend!
with love,
L