NEW YORK — A hand count — that’s how the winner of the special election serving as the city’s first test of ranked-choice voting may ultimately be determined.
Red tape, apparent partisanship on the state Board of Elections, and a reported breakdown in communications has left the city Board of Elections without the guidance it needs on using its new vote-tabulation software.
Until it gets answers, the city is resorting to this:
“And the official record will be the — if we have to go through the iterations — would be the hand count,” said Frederic Umane, president of the city Board of Elections. “But we will use the hand count to compare it to the program ... as a way of checking the program to make sure that the program works.”
The decision to potentially count ballots both by hand and machine in the Feb. 2 election was first reported by WNYC.
Commissioners made the call four days into the early-voting period for that race to fill an open City Council seat in Queens.
Eight candidates are on the ballot. They’ll be ranked by voters in order of preference because their race is the city’s first using the new voting system.
If no candidate gets a majority of the votes, the lowest-performing among them will be eliminated and his or her votes redistributed — the process continuing until someone does surpass 50%.
For now, in the special election, if no one gets a majority in the first round, the next rounds will be manually counted.
“The tabulation program is very quick,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York. “They’re going to run that first, simply, logically. So what’s going to happen is they’re going to tabulate the results and then they will confirm those results with a hand count. It’s going to be very simple and straightforward.”
This week, several City Council candidates are hosting online forums, workshops, and leafleting to spread awareness on how ranked-choice voting works.
Bronx hopeful Althea Stevens is part of that so-called Week of Action, but snafus with implementation simultaneously concern her.
“Ranked-choice voting is here; it’s here to stay,” said Stevens, a Bronx Council candidate. “But my pushback is always going to be, How is this is going to helping my people and my community and what does it look like for them?”
State and city board of elections officials were in touch Wednesday about a means of moving forward on the city's use of the new software.
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