A voter drops her ballot in Alameda County’s mail-in ballot drive-thru in Oakland, Calif., on Nov. 8, 2022.
Photo:
Brontë Wittpenn/Associated Press
Nearly two months after November’s election, Alameda County, Calif., has announced that it systematically counted the ballots wrong. Oops. The error didn’t affect the outcome in most races, but it flipped a seat on the Oakland School Board, and now the question is what to do about the certified winner who actually lost and the third-place finisher who won.
Blame the mess on official incompetence, but reserve some ire for ranked-choice voting (RCV), a system that makes it complicated even to explain the mistake. RCV asks voters to rank candidates in order of preference. If nobody wins an outright majority of first votes, the bottom candidate is eliminated, and his supporters are reshuffled based on their subsequent choices. This continues until a majority winner emerges.
But what if portions of a ballot are left blank? Imagine that a voter selects Kathy as his No. 2 choice, while marking nobody in the No. 1 slot. The way the system is intended to work, that ballot would count for Kathy in the first round of RCV tabulation. When a voter leaves a hole in his ranking, in other words, his subsequent preferences are supposed to move up to fill the gap.
Instead, Alameda County’s software was inadvertently configured so ballots with blanks would be “suspended” for that round of tabulation. This affected more than 200 votes for school board. The bad tallies show current board member Mike Hutchinson with 8,112 votes in the first round, trailing two challengers, Pecolia Manigo with 8,153 and Nick Resnick with 9,954. Therefore, Mr. Hutchinson was eliminated, and the eventual winner was Mr. Resnick.
If those 200 ballots are counted accurately, however, the ranked-choice election takes a different turn. Mr. Hutchinson moves ahead of Ms. Manigo in the first round, so she’s the one eliminated. Her supporters…
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