New York's 'head-swirling' mistake puts harsh spotlight on ranked-choice voting

Bellows stated that issuing partial results is a huge disservice to voters. We all know that patterns can vary greatly between those who vote on Election Day and absentee voters.Garcia's campaign released a memo on Monday declaring that Garcia was on a "strong path" to victory. Adams was about 2 percentage points behind Garcia after the latest vote count. Garcia will also benefit from the late-stage votes in major Black and Latino neighborhoods that ranked Andrew Yang or Wiley first and second, which challenge the notion that ranked voting might reduce voting power in communities where people of color.Although it will contain a large portion of the remaining ballots, the next update is expected Tuesday. It may not include all of them. The next update from the city won't be available until one week later.However, ranked-choice voting can lead to delays in the election results. Experts say voters must have faith in the system to make it more attractive for cities and states to adopt it in the future.FairVotes analysis shows that in the upcoming elections, there will be ranked-choice voting in 53 jurisdictions and two states across the country.Matt Dunlap, who was the ex-secretary of state for Maine and oversaw the implementation of ranked voting after voters approved it in 2016, stated that moving the state to an entirely-ranked vote system was largely dependent on trust.We couldn't tell anyone when we would be done [counting the votes]. This was something we'd never done before. He said that all we could tell them was where we were at any given moment. People still said that this was a rigged vote.Dunlap, who is now the state auditor said that Republicans in his state consider ranked-choice vote an existential threat. In an attempt to preserve the vote, Maine's state GOP attempted to repeal it before the presidential election. Others have called it confusing and claimed that it tilts the balance in favor of Democratic voters.However, exit polls by Common Cause and Rank the Vote NYC before Tuesday's error show high levels of trust among city voters in the ranked-choice system. Nearly 80 percent said they would support ranked-choice voting in future elections. 95 percent also found the process easy. Advocates in other areas are still pushing for ranked choice voting or similar alternatives. They claim that they are more representative of voters will than elections in which a plurality could elect a candidate in a splintered area to their states or jurisdictions.Many of the problems we have seen in the last few weeks can be attributed to incorrect ranked-choice voter selections, stated Sara Eskrich (executive director of Democracy Found), who is pushing for Final Five Voting to be an alternative to ranked choice voting in Wisconsin elections. Many problems with election administration have occurred that aren't the fault of the electoral process.Proponents also rejected the notion that Tuesday's errors were due to the system, and claimed that the election will still be successful.Lerner stated that this has nothing to do RCV. In all honesty, I believe that the majority of voters are patient. They understand that democracy is a slow process. It seems that the push has come from candidates and the media, not everyday voters.