Also, prod and staging/QA/dev - never the twain shall meet.
And wtf is a test ballot anyway? Are these physical ballots, or entries in the database? Neither inspires confidence in the integrity of this election.
You're expecting a lot from developers who were chosen because of their relation to elected officials rather than their domain expertise.
> The list of relatives stretches even to the [Board of Elections] computer programmers, including Rubén Díaz III, a Democrat who is the son of the Bronx borough president and grandson of a City Council member.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/nyregion/nyc-voting-elect...
Also, who said you couldn't question them? They were and always will be questioned.
Last year there were also lots of claims of statistical irregularities in the movement of vote tallies, and demands for investigations, which they mostly didn't get. Or in which they got a fake investigation at least - I remember seeing one video someone had secretly filmed inside a counting centre where some volunteers doing a recount were trying to report that a large run of ballots had identical signatures, and the overseer was telling them to ignore it, that it wasn't their job to report fraudulent ballots!
You're also making the rather generous assumption that this was an actual error. As other commenters observe, "test ballots" for which you need >100k of them, which contain real candidates names and which are posted to the production database do not sound like any defensible testing strategy. If it's genuine incompetence it's of the form that in the civil engineering world would send people to prison.
RCV in the US: "2 states, 1 county, 26 cities outside of Utah and 23 Utah cities" https://www.fairvote.org/rcv#where_is_ranked_choice_voting_u...
Approval in the US: Fargo and St. Louis
RCV campaigners hijacked public perception of the science. As an analogy, people don't believe in global warming because they have evaluated the evidence; they believe it because the scientists tell them to. RCV campaigners skipped the scientists and manufactured a false consensus around RCV. So RCV is what the common person associates with voting method reform.
I suspect that, if Instant Runoff Voting—I will continue not to reward the marketing effort of trying to claim the name “Ranked Choice Voting” for the worst seriously-advocated ranked choice election method—is seen as a panacea for anything, it’s by a very small fraction of even the people that prefer it to FPTP voting.
> But no matter how you feel about it, RCV is demonstrably more complicated than FPTP.
Forget FPTP, IRV is more complicated than many other ranked-ballots methods that aren’t Condorcet methods, and needlessly so.
One of the major disservices to Condorcet is that the vote-theorist communities insist on talking about the loop-breaking algorithms as being Condorcet methods, rather than as separate tie-breaking (loop-breaking) processes that are bolted on after identifying the (usually 1-member) Smith Set. Some of this is because the algorithmic implementations do both steps at once, but it's not necessary.
It's actually worse than that. The NYCBOE is not actually a state agency - it's an "administrative body" that's comprised of people selected by the two main political parties, and staffed by their family members. After they are appointed, they aren't under the oversight of any elected official.[0]
You're correct that the buck stops with Cuomo, though - changing this system would require him authorizing legislation at the state level. Due to the way New York's legislative process works, it's impossible for legislation to even reach a floor vote in the Senate without the governor's approval; the governor can essentially veto a bill behind closed doors by refusing to let it have a floor vote.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/nyregion/nyc-voting-elect...
It's still worth doing though.
Getting the election on even years would also help :-/
Edit: What I mean is, you can look over at a place like Switzerland and say "we should really run our elections like they do". But to do that you'd have to get the city officials, bureaucrats, and the party machine to relinquish power and have a change of heart... which I doubt will happen without some outside policing.
1. Is it seriously that difficult to just count votes? Why does this keep happening.
2. How can a decision even be made with so many absentee votes? Surely those could change who's eliminated and thus, the entire election.
This is what happens when you hire based on "connections" instead of competence.
2. These are just preliminary results to give a general idea of where the election is going and help debug the initial process.
Oh, New York usurped Florida at that title decades ago. The reason Florida gets attention isn't because its elections are run unusually badly; it's because Florida is always a very close swing state with a lot of electoral votes, so it gets a lot of national attention.
New York's election bungling - and even gerrymandering[0] - is actually way more extreme than what you see in states like Florida and North Carolina, but it's overlooked by national media because it doesn't have an effect on people outside the state.
[0] For example, NY-10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York%27s_10th_congressiona...
—
Proving bad gerrymandering by showing silly looking maps is not a good argument. There can be valid legitimate reasons for wonky mapping. Linking to wiki and a wonky looking map ends up manipulating people into agreeing with your argument without actually proving this case is bad gerrymandering.
people don't understand how managed the front page of HN is.
The most important consideration for elections, of course, is not theoretical optimality, but whether they are perceived as fair and secure.
I live (and voted) in NYC, and while this entire debacle is a comical embarrassment, I'm not at all convinced that any of this can bet attributed to ranked choice voting.
On the point of perceived fairness, the most recent poll (https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/06/28/poll-finds-new-yorke...) found that 95%(!!) of respondents found the ballot simple to complete, and 77% want to use RCV again. Granted, this poll was administered by organizations which lobbied for RCV in the first place, but I have a hard time believing that the margin of error could be in excess of 45%. It may very well be that a contingent of non-college graduate voters in NYC perceive RCV the way you describe, but they're decidedly in the minority — at least in NYC.
> RCV is undoubtedly a superior voting model to FPTP.
I've actually come to doubt this, when speaking of IRV in particular. I think "step 1: eliminate compromise" is questionable at best. "IRV but only the first n<<N choices" seems even worse.
Unlike in every other jurisdiction in the country, the NYC Board of Elections is not an independent agency and is not accountable to elected officials. It's run by party leaders who nominate their own allies (oftentimes family), with disastrous consequences[0]. It's been criticized for years, but eliminating it would require passing legislation at the state level, and for various political reasons, that's an uphill battle.
This might be the latest bungle, but it's not the first. In fact, it happens almost every single election cycle in NYC.
- In November 2020, many voters actually received absentee ballots that were addressed to the wrong people: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/nyregion/absentee-ballot-...
- In July 2020, 20% of absentee ballots were rejected, which is a staggeringly high number https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/one-five-mail-bal...
- In 2019, the Board of Elections failed to meet state requirements to provide books of voter rolls to candidates, so instead they published the full voting records online, complete with the unredacted name, address, and party affiliation of every registered voter in the city, available for bulk download. After backlash, they took the information down.[1]
- In 2016, there were mass purges of eligible voters from voting rolls, in violation of both state and federal laws, which prevented voters from casting ballots in the 2016 primaries[2]. This resulted in a federal lawsuit[3], resulting in a settlement in which the Board of Elections actually admitted that it knowingly violated state and federal laws (unlike settlements where parties formally admit no wrongdoing)[4].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/nyregion/nyc-voting-elect...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/nyregion/nyc-personal-vot...
[2] https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/politics/campaigns-e...
[3] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2017/ag-schneiderman-moves-i...
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/new-york-city-boa...
