BREAKING NEWS: We have long taken a firm stance that RCV does not pass our minimum bar for fair, secure, and viable election reform - for a number of reasons - but when catastrophic fails like this happen, we are as dismayed as anyone. @sfchronicle bit.ly/rcv-botch
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RCV is uniquely complex and uniquely prone to both voter errors and counting errors like this one, discovered by a 3rd party long after the election results were certified in Alameda County, CA. This kind of catastrophic error undermines the voting reform movement in general.
RCV is tallied using an unnecessarily complex algorithm with dozens of counterintuitive details and potential tabulation pitfalls. It is completely different from #STARVoting, #Approval, and other systems that are counted (and audited) with basic addition like the current system.
In this Alameda County RCV election, ballots which had skipped ranks were accidentally discarded instead of the the next ranking being counted. This voter error compounded with a tech error resulted in the wrong winner being certified. The elections board didn't catch the error.
Even more concerning, this happened in a jurisdiction that has been using RCV for 12 years, and the elections vendor and the certification body didn't catch the mistake either. The coding error applied to all the races, but was only sizable enough to flip the result in one race.
This comes one year after an even larger catastrophic RCV tabulation fail, where in the 2021 NYC mayoral election, a candidate discovered an error where the election board had accidentally added 135k "test ballots" to the published election results.
Fortunately for NYC, candidate Eric Adams had the integrity to report the discrepancy discovered, even though the fake test ballots which had been counted favored him. Fortunately for Adams, he went on to win anyways. Still, this error undermined the integrity of the election.
In the wake of the January 6th uprising, errors like these not only undermine RCV; they undermine our election officials, our candidates, and our democracy in general, threatening our Nation's integrity as a whole. It's absolutely unacceptable, and we can do better.
We support fair, simple, auditable, and secure voting methods including STAR Voting, Approval Voting, Ranked Robin, and others.
Not all electoral reforms are created equally. Not all reforms are worth it. We owe it to voters to get this right.
equal.vote
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