The Simple Fix for RCV's Big Waiting Game

So it's different in different places.

There's a couple of reasons for that.

In the large statewide places like Maine or Alaska, they really do have the excuse, I'll say, of ballot centralization.

They need to get all of the RCV data from far-flung counties or boroughs to one spot before they can run the rounds.

We'll get into it, but that's something that my system would help.

to ameliorate so that they could at least transmit unofficial data and be able to run them faster.

But for a place like D.C., where it's a geographically small jurisdiction, that's not what's really driving the delay.

I think there's a paranoia of... releasing data that would be perceived as misleading and boards of elections tend to play it extremely conservatively especially when it's a new rcb election there's this thing called the wild swings theory which is if you're going to run a ranked choice election and only 10 of the results are in you might see a cascading series of rounds where Some person gets eliminated in round two, and in the final results, that person didn't get eliminated.

It can make the results look really funny, and I think boards of elections just opt out from that altogether by waiting.

And I understand that.

I would ultimately like to get boards of elections out of the business of tabulating.

I just want them to be reporting numbers, reporting vote counts, and people can tabulate if they want to tabulate.

If they want to do it with 3% reporting, your mileage may vary.

You're probably not going to get very useful data, but there's no great reason not to release that data.

How would you compare that potential misleading element of releasing certain tabulation data with What we currently do where, as votes are being cast, not in live time, but election administrators in different jurisdictions do release early voting results for given candidates that could also, in theory, be skewed because people that vote early maybe tend to lean a certain way.

So even if early voting data is skewing one way, later on, as more percentages of the votes come in, that might shift.

Do you think their fear of a misleading set of data is a non-unique fear.

I

understand the fear.

I think my goal is to just make RCV elections feel more normal, feel more like every other election we have in America.

And I'm a big election junkie.

I stay up late on election nights.

I'm used to watching the way the media reports results come in.

And they're really good at explaining what's going on when the counts are low or talking about a blue shift or a red shift as early voting changes to in-person voting.

And how many times have you seen, oh, it's Alabama.