‘Nobody Will Ever Know Who Really Won’

The problem with trying to make the elections process longer and more complicated.

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It takes something special to unite the New York Post and the New York Times, but the city’s Board of Elections has managed the feat, earning condemnation from the source of perhaps the worst-ever newspaper headline as well as the home of some of the best.

It’s not hard to figure out why. The agency has still not managed to finish counting the results of the Democratic mayoral primary that was held nearly two weeks ago. It promises results on Tuesday, after the three-day holiday weekend. Even worse, the board released a set of incorrect numbers last week that were apparently the result of forgetting to purge placeholder test ballots from the system.

Among the board’s excuses are that pandemic rules and the introduction of ranked-choice voting has simply overwhelmed its limited resources. But Maine, not exactly famed for its exceptional state governance, successfully managed in November to count more ranked-choice votes than were cast last month in New York. Maine officials were deeper in pandemic restrictions then and had to gather ballots across an area about the size of Hungary.

As anyone who has ever lived in New York can attest, the city and the state are political basket cases. Aside from perpetual bipartisan corruption in Albany, there’s the actual conduct of the elections. It took nearly six weeks for the state to sort out its 2020 results, and to no one’s surprise, the biggest malefactor was the city’s Board of Elections. The city board has long been known to be a patronage-powered disaster, but the city politicians and their hangers-on who benefit from the sinecures have so far defeated all efforts to clean house.

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  1. Avatar photo
    SandyG

    The link provided for "new GOP-backed laws that make it easier for state officials to fool around with election returns" (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/republican-lawmakers-seek-greater-control-over-local-elections-01616870526) is old. Need a more current accounting of these laws.

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  2. FloridaMan21

    Incompetence, not fraud, has been the biggest issue in our elections system for awhile. New York has been the center of incompetence in elections for a long time taking literal months to count and recount its ballots from November. California is close behind with absolute incompetence in some parts of the state.

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    Cornelius O’Brien

    Editor: “sturdy boats”

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    Dustin Anglin

    I continue to find the use of RCV interesting, though I’m concerned that we seemed to have landed on the “instant run-off” method as the default flavor of RCV. I think variants like Borda Count (which assigns points based on how many other candidates an individual candidate outranks in a ballot) or the Condorcet method (which calculates the winner of the most head to head matchups of a candidate to other candidates) may produce better results, including in the “no one’s first choice, but everyone’s second choice” scenario.

    That said, given how complicated my previous paragraph is, I do share Chris’ concern that we are needlessly over complicating the voting process, and that any amount of time allowed between election and result will be wielded by unscrupulous actors to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the outcome. Sometimes KISS (keep it simple, stupid) is actually the right way to go.

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      Ed G

      I too would prefer some form of Condorcet voting, doesn't have to be RCV.
      The Wikipedia article is a interesting primer on the subject.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method?wprov=sfla1

      Any method that is more complicated than simple majority needs to be accompanied by good explainer videos to help educate hitters & "inoculate" them against misinformation.
      I'm hopeful it could help elect better candidates but it didn't fix incompetence

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    CynthiaW

    Excellent article, Mr. Stirewalt.

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  6. Avatar photo
    George.Skinner

    2020 was a fairly unusual election in terms of the amount of mail-in ballots, but it follows a trend where people have increasingly taken to advance voting. The trend doesn't seem to be linked to a particular need - just a childish desire to get to vote as soon as possible. Anyway, the problem with all of the mail-in ballots seems to be simply the extra scrutiny required to verify them. Systems developed for a relatively small fraction of the overall vote couldn't keep up with the massive increase in volume. This doesn't seem like an insoluble issue when states like Oregon have been completely mail-in voting. The question of the legitimacy of these votes seems entirely driven by a temper-tantrum that Trump lost the election. Even a cursory examination of the security measures and the effort needed to vote fraudulently tells you that it'd be a losing proposition.

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    rlritt

    I agree to a certain extent. What Democrats should be doing is sending people into these states to help voters. Make sure everyone Kas proper ID'S. Advertise the polling places and early voting hours. Make sure people can get help to get to their polling places. If voting by mail, tell people to make sure they get their request for a ballot in early, the not to forget to sign the ballot.

    The bigger problem is the states which have turned the voting oversight over to the state legislature instead of of SoS AND giving them the right to overturn the election results they don't like. That should be illegal.

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  8. Matt C

    I've been saying for a while that states need to genuinely, red or blue, start using Florida as a goal of what to reach. It is one of the biggest vote by mail states by percent and has long had around 2 weeks of early voting, and they still get final results out within hours unless the margins are miniscule, and have tons of transparency with tons of metrics available to everyone online in the same time frame enabling people to easily identify inconsistencies.

    Hopefully what is happening in NYC provides enough of an uproar to finally end the patronage system there. Statist interests' are the biggest thing keeping our election systems less efficient.

    I also hope people don't use this to impugn RCV. IT may take longer but its advantages are clear, especially in a 14 person primary where FPTP is nonsensical, like we saw in NYC.

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      Matt J

      After the 2000 election fiasco, the idea that anyone could credibly say "be more like Florida when you're counting your votes" makes me sad.

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      1. Mads Lindstrøm

        As far as I remember, it was the 2000 election fiasco that prompted Florida to make a good voting system. So it properly should be "be more like post-2000 Florida when you're counting your votes".

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        1. FloridaMan21

          This is true to a point. Florida ended the punch ballots and gave its counties the ability to count absentee ballots in advance of the election. 2000 was also just an incredibly, historically close election that any state which decided the balance of the Presidency would have had issues with as we see from not that close elections in Arizona or Georgia where the election as a whole is not in the balance. Out of millions of ballots cast, only 537 determined the entirety of the Presidential election which is crazy and caused Florida to send, what had been a pretty solid, typical system, into the most efficient the world has ever seen (plus DeSantis removing the Broward Supervisor of Elections this past cycle). New York and California are particularly bad though. Some of the worst run elections in the country.

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    2. Avatar photo
      George.Skinner

      It's bizarre that New York has taken so long to determine the results. Optical scanners and voting machines are capable of collecting the data on each ballot immediately, and tabulating the results of RCV is merely a computer algorithm. At some political conventions, there's even been the bizarre spectacle of parties staggering out the announcement of the results of each round as a means of building "drama" and cultivate media coverage despite the final results being available the moment the last vote has been entered. The whole point of RCV is you get an instant run-off vote; you're not stuck doing an actual run-off between the top candidates a month later like the French presidential elections.

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        Matmos

        The reason for the delay is not the RCV, it’s the wait for the absentee ballots that are still eligible.

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        1. Avatar photo
          SandyG

          Yes, I thought that was the main idea of the article, after reading today's Dispatch Weekly bit on it: "the New York mayoral primary fiasco—it took officials more than two weeks to announce Eric Adams the winner of the Democratic primary after the city’s first use of ranked-choice voting—to illustrate why efforts by Democrats to make elections longer and more complicated will only end up causing people to lose faith in the process." I thought he was going to say RCV was put in place by Dems to make elections more complicated which is not true.

          Also, the title of this piece, "Nobody Will Ever Know Who Really Won" doesn't capture what the piece is about. I thought he was saying this about RCV. It's a Trump quote, out of his propaganda playbook.

          To Stirewalt's claim that Dems seek to make the elections process more complicated - that may be a RESULT of the changes the Dems seek, but they aren't seeking them in order to make it more complicated.

          I am reminded of something a judge told us prospective jurors the first time I ever served on jury duty. To the people complaining how long it took (this was decades ago, the process is much improved now) he said in some countries you can get charged, tried and executed all in the same day . . .

          Elections follow due process. Americans will lose faith in the process only when certain interested parties (I'm looking at you, GOP) tell them to.

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  9. Avatar photo
    Victor Clairmont

    Just go back to one day elections and absentee ballot voting.

    The fact we keep extending this and these problems keep popping up is ridiculous.

    Absolute incompetent from New York and Albany.

    Give us the day off too as a federal holiday. But it is crazy as pointed out by the article, more time is being given for these people to work and they are just blundering more.

    Florida has come a long way since Bush V Gore, and has done an excellent job with it tabulations. New York could learn from it.

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    1. Natty Bumpo

      I am coming around to the idea that we should scale back on mail in balloting, for the reasons you cite. I used mail in for the 2020 primary and general and a recent set of constitutional questions in PA. I see no problem with the mail in method other than the question of delay. Ordinarily, a delay of a day or two should not be a problem. But the cupidity invited by delay is becoming more and more problematic. Lets just go back to what we have always had and enforce barriers against screwing with the system.

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    2. Mads Lindstrøm

      And two more rules:

      1) Employers must inform their employees one month in advance, if they must work on voting day.

      2) People who must work on voting day, have the option of using an absentee ballot.

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        Victor Clairmont

        "People who must work on voting day, have the option of using an absentee ballot."

        *cough give overtime double pay *cough *cough

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    3. Mads Lindstrøm

      Sounds good, if you would add the rule that if anybody has to wait more than one hour in line to vote, then the governor must issue a public apology.

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  10. Beth C.

    I think you meant "sturdy boats," not "study boats." What would study boats be?

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