Conveniently the test votes had real candidate name instead of Pokemon or something, also conveniently test votes were posted into production database, not QA.
^ Lesson number 1 for QA is to use demonstrably fake metadata. Lorem Ipsum is good and if you need realish metadata like email addresses, translate real ones (i.e. from adam@google.com to testaccount+adam.google.com@tester.com)
Also, prod and staging/QA/dev - never the twain shall meet.
It’s of course possible that “test data” was an excuse they made up after the fact. Maybe it’s a cover story to hide even worse incompetence (or maliciousness). Why did it require a candidate to notice that the sums between rounds were wildly different?
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.
> Also, prod and staging/QA/dev - never the twain shall meet.
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.
The flipside of this is that some defects can get through because assumptions made by the data used for QA/development might not be true for production but you don't find that out until the code is actually in production working with production data.
I think even for those who do not subscribe to any election fraud conspiracies, this will seriously shake confidence in the election. If a mistake like this went by unnoticed until the results were posted, what other monkeying about with the database goes on?
Confused, I thought we found out last year that machine counting and absentee voting in the US were incredibly robust systems that nobody need worry about, or baselessly question. Now we hear about a single city count error that is actually several times larger than the entire national margin of victory in the last presidential election?
Confused, this error was easily spotted and is being addressed. Are you suggesting similar errors occurred in a much more improtant election but somehow escaped detection by bipartisan investigators?
Also, who said you couldn't question them? They were and always will be questioned.
It was spotted by someone claiming statistical irregularities in the movement of vote tallies between rounds and demanding an investigation, which this time, they got.
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.
Ranked Choice Voting is seen as a panacea to two party politics and polarization. Only time will tell if it actually helps this. But no matter how you feel about it, RCV is demonstrably more complicated than FPTP. And to address that complexity you need more bureaucrats, volunteers, software, and machines to tally and certify the results. In every step of the process you introduce more opportunities for error, and if we're being honest, fraud. And, New York City is well known for machine politics, corruption, and cronyism.
The sad thing is, Ranked Choice Voting isn't even the scientific consensus. The theorists have settled around cardinal and almost-cardinal methods (which IRV=RCV isn't), and the advocates who follow theorists have settled on Approval. But money backs RCV, so voting legislation pushes RCV.
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.
> Ranked Choice Voting is seen as a panacea to two party politics and polarization.
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.
I still don't think Condorcet is complicated. If one candidate would beat all others head-to-head, that candidate is the winner. It's just the loop-breaking algorithms that make it complicated, and people get hung up on those when they're relatively rare. Besides, if there's a loop you could just hold some sort of a runoff for the looped candidates.
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.
Conceptually, no. But we’re talking about, mostly, tallying complexity. Condorcet itself, and therefore some but not all Condorcet methods, is “simpler” than IRV in that the number of values that need to be tracked is smaller (at least where the ratio of the size of the electorate to the number of candidates is large, as it typically is in public election of officials), but that's not true of all Condorcet methods.
> 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.
That's not a “disservice to Condorcet”, its a necessity for the evaluation of real-world election methods.
I mean it's a disservice to communicating and messaging about Condorcet by making it seem more complicated than it is. There are countless Condorcet variants, of various complexity. To look at the complexity of those variants and paint with a broad brush by saying that "Condorcet is complicated" does a disservice to the aim of seeking broader acceptance of Condorcet.
An example is that the Condorcet Method (identifying the usually single-winner Smith Set) is not subject to the same various "voting flaws" that the various tie breaking mechanisms are. But then the community is happy to say that Condorcet is flawed along those lines when it's not.
> The NYC BOE is a state agency. The incompetence here lies with Cuomo, just like a lot of other issues plaguing the city
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.
> The thing I don't get is what's Cuomo's game? For 8 years now it seems like his only goals are massaging his ego and fucking over NYC as much as possible. What's the point?
You said it yourself: it's all about his ego. It's the one consistent theme throughout literally every aspect of his behavior.
Does the BOE run any “real” elections, or are they only responsible for party primaries?
It’s been noted many times that a party primary is basically a meaningless farce, since the DNC/RNC can invent any arbitrary procedure for selecting their candidates.
> Does the BOE run any “real” elections, or are they only responsible for party primaries?
All elections are run by the Board of Elections
> It’s been noted many times that a party primary is basically a meaningless farce, since the DNC/RNC can invent any arbitrary procedure for selecting their candidates.
The party control is actually much deeper than that. Parties can even cancel primary elections altogether if they want their "blessed" candidate to run in the general election without having to go through a primary.
Practice, competence, and probably more funding. I doubt members of the DOE are highly paid in NYC compared to market rates. The original comment still stands though. RCV is more complicated and therefore prone to error.
It's still worth doing though.
Getting the election on even years would also help :-/
> Practice, competence, and probably more funding. I doubt members of the DOE are highly paid in NYC compared to market rates
Other places do it by actually having a professional, independent state/city agency administer elections, instead of allowing the political parties to nominate their relatives to run the Board of Elections.
In New York, elections are literally run by the party leaders and their relatives.
> The county party chairs choose the board’s 10 commissioners — one Democrat and one Republican from each borough — and most other board employees. Tradition dictates that when staffers leave, they are replaced by someone from the same party and borough.
> Employees include Beth Fossella, the head of voter registration and mother of a former Republican congressman from Staten Island, Vito J. Fossella; Thomas Sattie, director of ballot management and son of the former Brooklyn Democratic district leader Maryrose Sattie; Pamela Perkins, administrative manager and wife of Democratic City Councilman Bill Perkins; Raphael Savino, deputy general counsel and brother of Joseph Savino, the former Bronx Republican leader; and Daniel Ortiz, deputy clerk in Brooklyn and son of Assemblyman Felix W. Ortiz, a Democrat.
> The list of relatives stretches even to the agency’s computer programmers, including Rubén Díaz III, a Democrat who is the son of the Bronx borough president and grandson of a City Council member.
I'd love to give you an answer on that, but I can't. Additionally, I don't know how helpful it would be since the corruption here is endemic.
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.
Why the fuck this shit happens in USA again and again? I'm from Italy, an almost failed state, and still we can count votes. Paper votes, btw, and yes, we have and use ID
Absolutely terrible timing for this type of mistake. If there's anything positive that can be said about it, it's that they owned up to the mistake despite how bad it makes them look especially in context of last year's election.
> New York is vying to displace Florida as the USA's poster child for "just because a state is big doesn't mean it can hold an election".
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.
A huge reason for Florida is 2000. 2000 is just two decades ago. “Decades ago” implies three or more decades ago. Even if it meant 2000, Florida couldn’t have been usurped immediately after what was a huge reason for its reputation.
—
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.
Florida actually does very well at turning out results after elections. This is mainly because of the 2000 election debacle that made the state a laughing stock (or more of one, depending on your view). Seriously, look how quickly they got results out for the 2020 election when compared to other states.
The experience with mail in voting and RCV in NYC is a textbook example of “in theory theory and practice are the same, but in practice they’re different.” RCV is undoubtedly a superior voting model to FPTP. And making it easier to vote is good too. But does it feel as decisive and reliable to your average non-college graduate as a FPTP election where results come down the same day?
The most important consideration for elections, of course, is not theoretical optimality, but whether they are perceived as fair and secure.
But RCV works just fine in places like Maine (statewide), Oregon, Minnesota, Colorado, Michigan, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maryland (select localities). It works just fine in Australia (nationwide), along with several other nations.
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.
Theory that says theory and practice are the same is bad theory. Theory is perfectly capable of acknowledging (not eliminating!) the difference.
> 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.
This is an issue with the NYC Board of Elections, not with RCV. Plenty of other jurisdictions already use RCV with no issue.
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 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].