NYC Mayor/2021 Megathread

[Gracile]

Can we expect RCV results for lower-level races (i.e. council) today?

[lfromnj]

How is one state, and one city in particular, so routinely incapable of running elections

South Florida too.

So you mean New York ?

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

New Yorkers should be allowed to run elections.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

How is one state, and one city in particular, so routinely incapable of running elections

RCV might be a lot more popular soon if the worst place at counting votes in the world weren’t doing it.

Electoral reforms sound great until New York City or California start implementing it.

[Malarkey Decider]

Question: If Garcia really has 25% and Wiley 24% going into the penultimate round, then isn't it possible that the uncounted absentees put her ahead of Garcia, making it her v. Adams in the final round?

[new_patomic]

Question: If Garcia really has 25% and Wiley 24% going into the penultimate round, then isn't it possible that the uncounted absentees put her ahead of Garcia, making it her v. Adams in the final round?

It is.

But for various reasons it seems unlikely. In that absentee voters seem to be more concentrated in areas Garcia did well in, and she did better with early votes which may be somewhat predictive of absentee votes, and so forth.

Then again considering how much NYE is screwing this up, who even knows anymore.

[Sorenroy]

I said before that it seems like it should be public information how many ballots of each ranking were, but thinking about that more, there's a reason for that that's more than academic. While some people might find the back-end mechanics of ranked choice voting confusing, releasing those numbers acts a bit like an audit in that it allows for third party's to check the work of the BoE. In a plurality-winner race, this is very easy: just look at the election returns and whichever candidate has the highest number is the winner. But in a ranked-choice race, those full ballots need to be released to make that calculation.

That's not to say that anyone should be calling fraud over the ballots being private, but it seems like a good government thing to do, just like paper trails for elections are good just in case. The only issue I can see is that it lowers the anonymity of voters slightly. If there was a hypothetical vote-buying scheme, or some type of machine politics counting votes, it's easier to identify people if you demand a very specific line of preferences. Any precinct is going to have a least a few dozen people who vote for a major candidate, but it's highly unlikely that they would vote for, lets say, two major candidates followed by a very specific non-entity.

Edit: When I was thinking about reasons for why releasing the full race tabulations would be a bad idea, the biggest concern I could come up with of was violating anonymity. I was coming from a stance that the results would be given precinct by precinct, just like elections in plurality system races. However, there really is no need for that if your main reason for releasing the tabulations is good government or audits on how the eliminations flowed. Just like a plurality race, the precinct by precinct breakdown does not actually matter for deciding who wins. There are still reasons for why having regional results would be a good idea - just like in a plurality system, doing so allows for people to see if their ballot was counted or for other organizations to check and make sure the elections were clean - but it's not required. That moves the issue of anonymity from a very granular level up to an election-wide level. Perhaps in some of the smallest races, like those in small towns of only a couple thousand people over a handful of precincts, you'd still be able to track the votes, but in larger elections, any specifically ranked ballot is that much more likely to blend in with all the other ballots cast. If someone really was trying to run an election scheme across multiple areas, the race-wide elections would mean that it would be impossible to track who followed the lead and who did not.

[new_patomic]

https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1410030761319845891?s=20

They've been pulled

Hilarious

[brucejoel99]

Question: If Garcia really has 25% and Wiley 24% going into the penultimate round, then isn't it possible that the uncounted absentees put her ahead of Garcia, making it her v. Adams in the final round?

It's possible, hence my having said a bit earlier that Wiley isn't "theoretically" finished, because it's close enough between her & Garcia that the number of outstanding absentee/affidavit votes could theoretically enable Wiley to break through to the final round, but it's not at all likely, hence my having said that she's "practically" finished, because a significant chunk of those outstanding votes are coming from areas that are firmly Garcialand on the backs of pre-allocation candidates (i.e., Yang, if today's released results are anything to go by) whose ranks are firmly for Garcia before they're for Wiley. Basically, if Garcia meets her expectations among absentees, then that - in combination with the released results' numbers - makes her all-but-guaranteed to be the one who makes it into the final round against Adams. The only real question remaining, then, is whether or not Garcia somehow manages to under-perform expectations among absentees for whatever reason.

[brucejoel99]

https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1410030761319845891?s=20

They've been pulled

Hilarious

Pure, absolute clownery. Hopefully it didn't have a significant mathematical effect on the final round.

[wbrocks67]

Well, it was nice to think Garcia had a huge chance for a second. Hopefully these revised results don't mess up things too much but it sounds like it might just be some typos and the final #s should stand/be close?

If the actual # is still Adams +2, i have to imagine Garcia pulls ahead with absentees.

Which like others have said, is going to make pundits look like jokes *AGAIN* after they all fawned over Adams the day after acting as if he had the whole wrapped up

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

A lot of the data crunchers on Twitter seem to think that the discrepancy won't impact the final numbers much, but I guess we will see. Regardless, a few people will probably be losing their jobs tonight.

[emailking]

Nobody's losing their job. These aren't even the results. It's instant runoff. You don't have anything until you have everything.

[Oryxslayer]

Nobody's losing their job. These aren't even the results. It's instant runoff. You don't have anything until you have everything.

Hilariously, if NY had adequate voting laws, people would lose their jobs for lack of professionality. But NYC made it very clear that these were simply estimates without the absentees, - the count was always going to be corrected. So an emergency retabulation is nothing extraordinary.

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

The problem has been identified! Turns out the BOE entered in about 135K "dummy votes" to test out their computers and forgot to delete them.

https://twitter.com/BOENYC/status/1410064145064599554?s=20

[jaichind]

I have no idea why they decided to release the result this way.  It seems to me they should first
a) count the absentee ballots once all of them are cured and then release the combined first round results then
b) do the round by round RCV and then release the results

it is not clear that the sequence of candidates being eliminated would be same once you add in the absentee ballots so this entire exercise  is a waste of time

[new_patomic]

Were the dummy votes all exhausted, or

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

New York needs to ship in some of Maine’s vote counters to show them how a RCV election works

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

Were the dummy votes all exhausted, or

Most were exhausted by round 7, from what I have read.

[new_patomic]

Were the dummy votes all exhausted, or

Most were exhausted by round 7, from what I have read.

So either this has no affect whatsoever on the final margin between Garcia and Adams, or potentially it's anyone's guess.

[new_patomic]

What appears to be the case is most dummy votes that went to minor candidates tended to exhaust pretty quickly.

https://twitter.com/ryanmatsumoto1/status/1410062043231637507?s=20
But I'm not sure what that means for Yang, Wiley, Garcia, and Adams.

Adams got more dummy votes, followed by Yang, Garcia, and then Wiley in that order. I feel like this could actually impact who, before absentees are counted, is in the top 2 considering the margin between Garcia and Wiley was only .5 percent. And that was thanks to her getting a near majority of Yang voters.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/BenJ_Rosenblatt/status/1410064369573040130?s=20

[Dereich]

Looks like he got duped by the Bronx E-Day vote just like Wasserman. Those votes largely were good for him, so this isn't an obvious target to start your tantrum campaign.

Looks like it WAS a pretty good target for him to focus on.

[Alben Barkley]

LOL is there any state in the nation more incompetent at running elections than New York?

[SInNYC]

I have no idea why they decided to release the result this way.  It seems to me they should first
a) count the absentee ballots once all of them are cured and then release the combined first round results then
b) do the round by round RCV and then release the results

it is not clear that the sequence of candidates being eliminated would be same once you add in the absentee ballots so this entire exercise  is a waste of time

I agree. They should have waited until after the curing deadline and only released RCV results the week of Jul 12.

However, people who dont understand the reason for the delay would be yammering away about how it takes so long to count.