Is "rank choice" voting recount-proof?
I'm still working on understanding the details of the tabulation of votes in the upcoming Portland City Council elections. Somebody posted a link on Reddit to my latest post on that subject, and a few hundred new people have shown up here to read what I've come up with so far.
But while I continue to sort out some of the minutiae of the vote-counting, a thought occurs to me: This "system" of voting may turn out to be resistant to recounts.
Unless the result is super-close, as I understand it, a recount must be paid for by the candidate requesting it. Given the agonizingly long process involved in hand-counting votes under "rank choice" voting, a recount would take many, many more person hours than if it were a simple most-votes-wins election. The computer software can crunch all the numbers and permutations in minutes, but a human reproduction of that effort would take days, or weeks. The cost could be pretty daunting if worker salaries are taken into account, as I would think they are.
Multnomah County did a dry run of a hand recount recently, which they proudly reported on here. It looks nuts. And picture it with 20 times more ballots to deal with.
Supposedly this is all more democratic than the old primary-and-runoff, but I'm not buying it. Especially if it's recount-proof due to the expense.
Looking up the recount rules, I stumbled on this: “ If two or more candidates are tied with the fewest votes in a round, and tabulation cannot continue until the candidate with the fewest votes is defeated, then the candidate to be defeated is determined by lot by the county elections officer or officers responsible for tabulating the contest. The result of the tie resolution must be recorded and reused in the event of a recount.”
ReplyDeleteOne, will the county show the details, round by round, of the vote? Two, will they be able to replicate the vote exactly? Or will the entire process be so opaque that not even Jack can penetrate the shroud?
ReplyDeleteWe should stop calling it Rank Choice and use the more correct term, "Cluster Fruck"...
ReplyDeleteAgreed
DeleteAll of this was known long before the vote. But no one in our local media did anything beyond instructing the mouth-breathers that the old commission system was, well...old...and that Portland was the only American city using it. Time was, saying that Portland was doing something weird and unique would have been high praise.
ReplyDeleteThis is just the latest progressive bait-n-switch; big promises now, reality bites after the voters have been hornswoggled. You'd think that might have sunk in--but Portland people are slow learners.
Extra points for "hornswoggled"
DeleteWhy wouldn't a "recount" simply be a hand tabulation of the ballots? Why do you need to manually run the software process?
ReplyDelete