Given the number of observers and all the officious looking elections personnel in the room, you might think differently. However, the Ward 2 St. Paul City Council “Ranked Choice Voting” hand count taking place at 90 West Plato Boulevard as the Scoop types these words may look and feel like a recount, but it ain’t. It’s a hand count.
For the difference, read up on Ranked Choice or watch the YouTube video here.
For one thing, elections observers, even candidates, are not allowed to challenge the ballots. They can ask questions, but they can’t ask that a ballot be pulled out. Given that there’s little more than 5,300 ballots, there’s not much to challenge, anyway.
Green Party candidate Jim Ivey reports he’s only come across one questionable ballot to date, where a confused fellow (or fella?) voted for Dave Thune and a write-in candidate in the same first-choice column. Woops.
(That ballot went to Thune, as it would have under the Ranked Choice process eventually anyway, even if the write-in had been recorded first.)
For now, humans are doing what no federally-certified ballot-counting machines on the market are currently calibrated to do, and that’s “count sideways,” according to Ramsey County Elections Manager Joe Mansky.
The counting process requires eliminating the weakest vote-getters among the five candidates on the ballots — currently, Cynthia Schanno and Sharon Anderson — and redistributing their votes. In a second round of counting, the next weakest vote-getter will be dropped (either Jim Ivey or Bill Hosko).
Those votes, too, will be redistributed. The redistributed votes may or may not be enough to put the remaining challenger (Ivey or Hosko) above the incumbent, Thune, who currently holds the most votes with 39 percent of the vote.
Instead of just scanning down a ballot and recording bubbles, a machine would have to scan down, determine that the 1st place vote (let’s say, Anderson) has been exhausted, and then scan sideways to find out who that person picked in second, third, fourth or fifth place.
If that weren’t complicated enough, here’s a quirk that might really throw your typical Nintendo-variety computer for a spin: what happens if the computer scans down and sideways and discovers that the person voted for Schanno in first place, and Anderson in second place, even though Anderson was eliminated first?
Now, the vote-counting machine — (or human being, same difference) — has to look even farther sideways to see who that person voted for in third place. Thune, Hosko, Ivey or a write-in could pick up a vote there, or it could be blank.
Here’s another quirk: Let’s say the voter filled in a first-choice and a sixth-choice but left the choices in the middle blank. How is that ballot counted?
It’s counted as if the voter had picked a first choice and a second choice. The empty ballots are skipped, says Mansky.
Here’s more from Mansky on the technology, or lack thereof, involved in the non-recount:
“I’ve talked to the vendors. None of them have presented a system like this for certification in Washington. Even if we had a system like that, I’d prefer to do this (he motions to the handcount) so candidates like Jim Ivey and Bill Hosko can see every ballot — see how every ballot is counted. I think that’s a real strength of the system. It’s totally transparent.”
So sayeth Mansky. What are your thoughts? The true test of the system will probably happen leading up to the 2013 election, when Mayor Chris Coleman is likely to be on the ballot for re-election to a third term.
With no primary under the Ranked Choice system, Coleman may or may not face a heap of challengers. History dictates that mayoral elections draw twice as many voters to the polls, so Mansky will have his work cut out for him when it comes to voter education on how Ranked Choice works.
That’s not cheap or easy, though few, if any, problems have been reported with the 2011 election so far. Eliminating the primary eliminates some public spending, but voter education takes staff time and public dollars, too. (The bills get counted sometime in December, which is another story for a later date.)
Feel free to sound off below…