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Ranked-Choice Voting Won’t Work If You Don’t Count ALL the Votes

Solange
2 min readJun 30, 2021

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You CAN’T Start Eliminating Candidates Before ALL Votes Are Counted

From https://www.voting.nyc/how-to-vote/ranked-choice-voting/how-votes-are-counted/#/

News Flash: Absentee ballots are still ballots. So, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, Board of Elections. This pneumonic device could help the beleaguered NYC Board of Elections officials with something called the order of operations. This means that if you have 125,000 absentee ballots left to count, you are NOT done counting the ballots, and you cannot start eliminating candidates.

According to Ballotpedia

1. Voters rank the candidates for a given office by preference on their ballots.

2. If a candidate wins an outright majority of first-preference votes (i.e., 50 percent plus one), he or she will be declared the winner.

3. If, on the other hand, no candidates win an outright majority of first-preference votes, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated.

4. All first-preference votes for the failed…

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Solange
Solange

Written by Solange

(she/her) Think you’re registered to vote? Check! https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/ They seem to be purging the voter rolls in a most uneven manner!

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