If you thought the vote-counting in the 2020 presidential election was a mess, just wait for this summer’s New York City primaries.
The city has adopted “ranked-choice voting,” or RCV, an idea beloved of certain reformers that massively complicates the tallying process by having voters mark their second, third and so on choices, then redistributing ballots from low-performing candidates to those that did better, potentially in multiple rounds of counting, until a “true” winner emerges.
The first test was the Feb. 23 special election for the Queens council seat formerly held by Donovan Richards, now borough president — and the Board of Elections now hopes to start the counting next Tuesday, a full three weeks after ballots were cast.
Voters OK’d RCV in 2019, but no city leader bothered to consider how it would interact with various other voting reforms (early voting, expanded mail-in voting, “ballot curing”) or how the notoriously incompetent Board of Elections would manage it all.
For starters, the BOE says it now can’t tally votes until the five borough offices receive all ballots, including absentee and military. Plus, under a 2020 state law, the affidavit portion of absentee ballots can be cured of seven specific errors; the voter must return the cured ballot to the BOE within seven business days of receiving notice of the errors. That can add up to another 10 days to determining the tally in a tight race.
And, as Gothamist notes, the state Board of Elections must approve new software to aid in counting these complex ballots. Without it, the CD 31 race will have to be counted by hand, which will likely take more weeks, with multiple rounds of counting.
Even if the software is OK’d soon, forget about knowing the winner of many Democratic primaries until weeks after Primary Day. And bet that countless candidates will be screaming about the illegitimacy of it all.
If the BOE isn’t positive it can work out the kinks, lawmakers should suspend implementing RCV and leave the city with the familiar process of a runoff vote. Otherwise, half the politicians in town are going to start sounding like former President Donald Trump.
