"Rank choice" voting trips up even the experts
I've been trying to get to the bottom of it myself. I think I've figured out how the mayor's race will be counted; I wrote it up here. But I'm still puzzling over the City Council races; as of yet, I've only gotten this far.
But while I try to figure that one out, I did notice and report an apparent error on the Multnomah County elections website, which the county has now corrected. Until yesterday, it read in part as follows:
That formula's not right, at least when you apply it to the mayor's race. In the mayor's race, the winner does not have to have 50 percent plus 1 of the total number of ballots received. He or she needs only 50 percent plus 1 of the votes being counted in the final round of "rank choice" tallying. By that time, some voters will have been declared "inactive," and their ballots will no longer count.
Here's how the page now reads, as corrected:
It's no wonder that the county had a hard time explaining it correctly. The untested, goofball system that the city charter commission jesters devised takes three and a half pages to explain in the city code. Anyway, it's nice to see the poor vote-counters in Multnomah County, who have to implement the insanity, cleaning up their mistake.
Of course, small parts of Portland are in Washington and Clackamas Counties, and you have to hope and pray that the elections folks in those two offices are on the same page. At least in Clackistan, high levels of confidence and goodwill have not been earned over the years.
Between last-minute ballots trickling in (they all count if postmarked by Election Day), three counties involved, and multiple rounds of two different versions of "rank choice" being required, including the more complex system in each of four council districts, I'm sure the results are going to be a mite slow. Not to mention impossibly complicated to understand. Election night parties will probably consist of people dancing around giant inflatable question marks.
Eventually winners will be declared. Then there will be the sour grapes, and maybe the lawsuits. Portland wouldn't have it any other way.
Perfect picture to headline the post. I remember the Marchand calculator from the late 50’s. Back then, automobile dealers called it the “Okie Charmer”.
ReplyDeleteI had a job in the registrar's office in my undergrad college. A wonderful job. We had an electric adding machine along the same lines as the one pictured here. When it did division, it whirred, and the carriage moved like a typewriter as the digits appeared. If you divided by zero, it would run forever, or until it caught fire.
Delete“If you divided by zero, it would run forever, or until it caught fire.”
DeleteIf that isn’t some kind of metaphor.
My father was a CPA all his working life (Port of Portland). At home he was also an insurance agent among other number crunching endeavors and his home office was full of manual and electric "adding machines" including something like this one. I used to play with them always thinking something was going to happen if I pushed the right buttons. And, I can still smell his cigar smoke when I think of them.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, Clackamas County voters did boot Sherry Hall, replacing her with Catherine McMullen. Since being elected, Ms. McMullen has added a ballot tracker, which WashCo and MultCo have had for years. Whether they’re prepared to count the Portland mayoral/council ballots remains to be seen.
ReplyDeleteOne question worth asking: who owns the algorithms that will be used to make the mayor and council computations? Is the code "open source?" Has the code been reviewed by any outside consultants? How much did the county pay for this new algorithm?
ReplyDeleteAnd--how soon can we put a charter revision on the next ballot?
Most voting machines are privately owned and managed so the code is not available for inspection. There has been a lot of hearings from experts that point out how easy they are to "get the results" they want.
DeleteWe have no idea that they have programmed the tabulator correctly. I'm guessing that there will be a ton of questions about the final tally results. Even the optical scanner might get confused with six ranking slots and many candidates. But hey, EQUITY baby.
ReplyDeleteI just don’t understand why the Charter Commission had to choice this specific method of ranked choice voting, and not the more simple method that has been done in many places. Leave it to Portland mucky mucks to really screw up the most simple things.
ReplyDeleteDeep thought is the default method of solving simple problems for Portland’s elected and bureaucrat leaders.
DeleteAlong with reinventing the wheel when a perfectly fine solution sits right in front of them.
DeleteAs a software engineer, I really wish that whatever they're using for tabulating this mess was open source so we could audit the logic ourselves.
ReplyDeleteWhy do I have a feeling that not a single line of the code will be made available for inspection, which makes it a "trusted" black box that nobody really knows what's going on inside other than the blessed few who wrote it and put a giant padlock on it?
Hear hear. The audit will consist of someone saying "Trust me, bro."
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