Tag Archives: instant runoff voting

Watching NYC results unfold

alternative voting systems, primaries

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.)

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A little bit of patience in NYC

absentee ballots, alternative voting systems, election administration

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.

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The Timing of Multiple-Round Elections

alternative voting systems, election administration, primaries

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.

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