NBC reports on the big spotlight that ranked-choice voting got on Tuesday, and suggests that the election may provide both proponents and opponents with “fresh data.”
Category Archives: alternative voting systems
Watching NYC results unfold
My last post yesterday highlighted the patience NYC voters might need, but it looks like the verdict was pretty clear even in the first round of results, and will likely get clearer as the count rolls on.
As the count does progress, even if there’s less nail-biting over the eventual winner, you’ll want to check out the astonishingly great data visualization work of the NYC Election Atlas, brought to you by Steve Romalewski and the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of CUNY. For the 2021 NYC race, they’ve got interactive maps and infographics (go to 2021 RCV results: screenshot below) showing which support came from where in which round.
More coming for 2025, and undoubtedly worth your while. (And puts the ostensibly “most detailed map of the NYC mayoral primary” to shame.)
A little bit of patience in NYC
NYC news outlets today are letting voters know they may need a little bit of patience to get results from the primary. The City’s board of elections has a helpful explainer on why. First-choice results can be tabulated right away. But if no candidate gets a majority in the first round, the last-place candidate is eliminated with redistribution of their supporters’ votes — and the city needs to know who’s in last place before doing that calculation. Which means waiting for all the ballots (including mail ballots and provisional ballots) to come in.
(UPDATE: it’d still be possible to release preliminary tentative rolling totals of both first-round and ultimate conclusion, clearly marked as preliminary, to show that the first-round total might well be misleading. And for practical purposes, the fact that there’s no “sore-loser law” in the city’s elections may mean that the primary isn’t really over until the fall.)
Also, while I’m highlighting explainers: CNN has an interactive ranked-choice primer using ice cream (perhaps to help New Yorkers beat the heat today).
And the Forward wonders whether Larry David’s to thank for the New York law that will allow people to hand out water to voters waiting on line in the heat.
“Running a low-turnout Georgia runoff election could cost $100 per vote”
The AP’s lede:
Miller County Election Supervisor Jerry Calhoun says he’s not sure anyone will vote in an upcoming Democratic primary runoff.
After all, the southwest Georgia county only recorded one vote in the June 17 Democratic primary for the state Public Service Commission among candidates Keisha Waites, Peter Hubbard and Robert Jones.
. . .
But the Democratic runoff might struggle to reach 1% turnout statewide. And counties could spend $10 million statewide to hold the election, based on a sampling of some county spending. That could be more than $100 per vote.
New York City’s ranked-choice primary
With the hotly-contested ranked choice primary in NYC on Tuesday, voters in NYC (and well beyond) are getting a lot of publicity about how ranked-choice voting works.
The New Republic offers praise for what it calls the “generally friendly, policy-focused” campaign style that the primary has engendered.
Elsewhere, Stephen Pettigrew and Dylan Radley have a column out today about errors marking the ballot, following up on their paper here. Surveying ballots from a bunch of different jurisdiction, the paper finds that 4.8% attempts to vote for an RCV office contain an improper mark, that 90% of votes with an improper mark are nevertheless ultimately counted in the final tabulation, and that the average rejection rate in ranked choice races – while small – is still considerably higher than the rate in races without ranked choice.
Both the style of campaigning and the rate of errors in marking the ballot are factors – two among many – in assessing the desirability of a system. I’ll be interested to see if the error rate in particular is at all different in the NYC primary after the considerable wave of publicity.
New Iowa law allows poll workers to challenge voters on the basis of citizenship, bans ranked choice voting, and changes major party status rules
Tom Barton for the Cedar Rapids Gazette:
House File 954 addresses elections laws regarding voter registration, citizenship and major party status. It also bans ranked choice voting in Iowa.
It adds citizenship status to age and residency under which an election precinct official can challenge someone’s voter registration, and creates new language on declaration forms confirming the voter is a U.S. citizen.
The new law allows the Iowa Secretary of State to use state and federal documentation to determine the U.S. citizenship status of Iowans on the state’s voter registration list and create a new voter registration status of “unconfirmed” for individuals whose citizenship the state cannot verify. It requires the Iowa Department of Transportation to send the Secretary of State a list of each person 17 years and older who has submitted documentation to the DOT indicating they are not a citizen.
The piece also covers the new recount law, which I wrote about here.
. . .
A political party’s candidate for governor or president will need to receive at least 2 percent of the general election vote in three consecutive election cycles as opposed to one to be recognized as major political parties in Iowa.
“An Initial Assessment of Proportional Ranked-Choice Voting in Portland, Oregon”
New report from AEI by Kevin Kosar, Jaehun Lee, and Jack Santucci:
Our core findings are as follows:
- Voter Choices. There were more candidates overall in 2024 than in past elections, although each voter could choose only among the candidates who ran in their districts. The number of candidates pursuing each council seat, however, was consistent with those in past elections and sometimes lower. Voters could better express their choices by virtue of ranking their candidate selections and being represented by more than one member. Yet the ranking of candidates had little effect on the outcomes.
- Increased Voter Turnout. Replacing a two-round election for city council with a general election in November resulted in more votes cast for city council races at the first stage of candidate elimination. But there was no clear increase in voter turnout after Portland enacted its new electoral system.
- Better Racial Representation. The candidate pool across all districts was racially diverse, with the share of black candidates greatly exceeding the share of blacks in Portland’s population, although Asians, Latinos, and whites were underrepresented in the candidate pool compared to their shares of the population. The racial composition of elected city council members was similarly diverse, with the shares of Asians, blacks, and Latinos elected reaching or exceeding the shares of these groups in the city population.
- Increased Neighborhood Representation. Dividing the city into four districts with multiple members each probably increased representation from different neighborhoods on the council, yet there are not good data to substantiate this determination.
It is too early to draw strong conclusions. Limited data availability also makes it hard to provide pre-to-post-reform comparisons in some dimensions. However, this report should be instructive as more cities consider similar changes.
The Timing of Multiple-Round Elections
In his most recent Substack, Rob Richie offers some (exceedingly respectful) pushback on my post here about this New Bedford decision to hold a primary on October 7 before a general election November 4. He makes “the case for faster runoff elections — balancing voter access and voter energy.”
And he’s absolutely right that increasing the time between one round of elections and another can lead to a drop in turnout. In particular, he presents compelling data that runoff elections (most often in jurisdictions that require a majority instead of a plurality win) are correlated with a drop in turnout as the time lag from the main event increases.
That said, I’ll stand by my critique of the New Bedford plan in its context. First, when we’re talking about a primary and a general election, and not a runoff, I’d be surprised if there’s substantial evidence for the notion that the second round (the general election) will see lower turnout than the first (the primary). That’s particularly true if the general election is held on an early-November day that the public expects, but the primary timing is distinct from when most other municipalities in the area hold their primaries. (All of these calculations would change if the elections were consolidated on even years with other higher-profile elections, rather than on odd years … and I know those changes come with tradeoffs of their own.)
Also, the elections calendar has to account for common American process, which is really why I thought the piece about New Bedford was so valuable: it walks through the various steps that are normally hidden from public view. We allow recounts and challenges to election results after a primary’s election day, and (particularly important in low-turnout municipal elections) we allow mail voting that requires time for printing and sending ballots before a general’s election day. The time between the end of challenges for one round of an election and the need to print ballots for a subsequent round is going to make for a VERY tight squeeze in New Bedford. When Friday at 5pm is the last time to request a recount and the following Monday is the day that ballots have to be sent to the printer, that’s a schedule built on a prayer. And when you throw in our profoundly counterproductive apparent American commitment to underfunding and understaffing our elections offices, it’s never a great idea to create a plan that requires everything to run perfectly.
Rob’s been arguing for decades for instant runoff voting, and I think in many contexts it can be a good idea to eliminate the need for a second round of voting flat-out. But if you’re going to have a system with two rounds of voting, there has to be enough time to make sure they both work.
“The Instant Runoff Voting Patchwork: Handling Voter Errors and Ballot Length”
Tait Helgaas has written this student comment in the U. Pa. L. Rev. Here is the abstract:
As states and cities across the United States adopt instant runoff voting (IRV) in their constitutions and charters, they enact statutes and ordinances to implement this electoral system. IRV laws vary across jurisdictions, including by how many candidates they allow voters to rank and how they handle voters’ ballot-marking errors. These variations affect both the fraction of ballots disqualified due to voter error and whether an election’s winner is deemed to have earned a majority of votes. To maximize the number of ballots in the final round of tabulation and increase the odds of a majoritarian outcome, jurisdictions should consider adopting the IRV implementation rules proposed here: (1) allow voters to rank all candidates and (2) interpret overvotes, skipped rankings, and overrankings in the manner outlined within.
Watch Archived Video of Safeguarding Democracy Program on Partisan Primaries, Polarization and the Risk of Extremism (with Azari, Foley, Masket, and Pildes)
“Assessing Alaska’s Top-4 Primary and Ranked Choice Voting Electoral Reform: More Moderate Winners, More Moderate Policy”
Glenn Wright, Ben Reilly and David Lublin have published this article in the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy. Here is the abstract:
In recent years, ranked choice voting (RCV) has emerged as a leading electoral reform, often in combination with moves to open up primaries in order to increase voter choice and select more widely-supported representatives. Both nonpartisan primaries and RCV general elections have attracted advocacy from those seeking solutions to democratic malaise and polarization, and been introduced in different forms in several states. Despite this, only one legislature across the country has ever been elected under this model: the 2022 Alaskan State legislature, which combined a Top-4 nonpartisan primary with an RCV election. We assess the impact of this reform via ‘before and after’ case studies of individual electoral (re)matches, a survey of candidate ideological and policy positions, and examination of legislative coalitions. This research design allows us to isolate the impact of Top 4/RCV compared to the former model of closed party primaries and plurality general elections. We show that Alaska’s new electoral system provided more choice for voters and appears to have driven changes in both electoral outcomes and public policy. Despite more extremists standing for election post-reform, winning candidates were more likely to be centrists willing to work across the aisle and espouse moderate policy positions than prior to the reform.
“New York Mayor Eric Adams to run for reelection as independent”
New York Mayor Eric Adams said Thursday that he would run for reelection as an independent, opting not to participate in the Democratic primary.
In a campaign video shared on social media, Adams said that although he remains a Democrat, “I am announcing that I will forgo the Democratic primary for mayor and appeal directly to all New Yorkers as an independent candidate in the general election.”
The announcementcame one day after a federal judge dismissed a corruption indictment against Adams, after a controversial push by the Justice Department to terminate the case. Adams pleaded not guilty last year to federal charges of bribery, wire fraud and seeking illegal campaign donations. He has been accused of cutting a deal with President Donald Trump to avoid prison — which he has denied — and his recent association with Trump has angered New York Democrats, a long list of whom began fundraising last year in a bid to unseat him in the primary.
Rob Richie writes in about this twist: “While NYC uses Ranked Choice Voting for party primaries, the charter commission narrowly voted not to put use fo RCV in general elections on the ballot, tied largely to how to have RCV interact with disaggregated fusion. So this could be a wild ride this year depending on the outcome of the Democratic and Republican mayoral primaries.”
April 10 Safeguarding Democracy Project Webinar: “Partisan Primaries, Polarization, and the Risks of Extremism”
Join us for the final SDP webinar of the spring semester, April 10 at 12:15 pm PT (free registration required):
| Thursday, April 10 |
| Partisan Primaries, Polarization, and the Risks of Extremism |
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| Register for the webinar here. Thursday, April 10, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Webinar Julia Azari, Marquette University, Ned Foley, The University of Ohio, Moritz College of Law, Seth Masket, Denver University, and Rick Pildes, NYU Law School Richard L. Hasen, moderator (Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, UCLA |
“Report: Deficiencies in Recent Research on Ranked Choice Voting Ballot Error Rates”
New from Alan Parry and John Kidd:
- This report discusses recent research on ranked choice voting (RCV) and ballot error rates.
- Several studies indicate that ballot error in RCV elections follows the same patterns as error in non-RCV elections. However, two new studies – More Choices, More Problems? Ranked Choice Voting Errors in New York City and Ballot Marking Errors in Ranked-Choice Voting – claim that RCV increases ballot error rates. We show that both studies suffer from serious methodological and analytical flaws – the former from statistical analysis concerns and lack of suitable control cases, and the latter from false equivalence.
- Overall, relatively few ballots in RCV elections contain an error, and even fewer ballots are rejected. For most ballots containing an error, the voter’s intent is clear and the ballot is counted as intended.
- Future research should contextualize the impact of RCV more comprehensively, and compare RCV and single-choice voting more carefully. For example, if RCV and single-choice voting differ in terms of ballot error, that difference should be weighed against the fact that RCV makes more ballots count meaningfully. Recent research shows that RCV causes an average of 17% more votes to directly affect the outcome between top candidates.