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State Board of Elections Approves Software To Tabulate Ranked-Choice Primary Results
By
Brigid Bergin
Published May 25, 2021
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Scott Heins / Gothamist
By
Brigid Bergin
Published May 25, 2021
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It may take until mid-July to know who has won all the New York City primary contests, but at least elections officials won’t need to hand count tens of thousands of ballots. The New York State Board of Elections finally issued its unanimous approval on Tuesday for the city to use software to tabulate the ranked-choice vote results.
The approval comes after more than 18 months of back and forth between the city and state over the process required to test and implement the Universal Ranked-Choice Voting Tabulator, the software selected by the city which was developed by a non-partisan non-profit called The Ranked Choice Resource Center. It wasn’t until January of this year that state officials finally agreed to allow the mandatory testing and certification to take place.
The reluctance from state officials stemmed in part from a position, echoed by the State Board’s Republican co-chair Peter Kosinki at the meeting Tuesday, that the city was exceeding its authority when it enacted ranked-choice voting in the first place. He argued that the system conflicts with state election law. “I think they have overstepped,” he said, warning that New York City could be setting a precedent for other localities when it comes to changing the processes used to select their local representatives.
Democratic co-chair Douglas Kellner countered that the state constitution already grants localities this authority and cited case law supporting the city’s ability to select its local representatives with this system. Kellner also noted that courts have ruled against the only lawsuit that sought to block the use of ranked-choice voting.
The state did identify a handful of issues with the URC tabulator, which was submitted for certification testing in March. The one outstanding issue is related to the security protocols the city BOE needs to establish.
“In order for the tabulation system to work, the cast-vote record for the scanners have to be imported into this tabulation system,” Kellner said, referring to data that shows how voters ranked all their choices. He said the city needs to ensure that records that are being fed into the tabulation system are the same as the ones that are coming out of the election scanner machines. “There is a security gap there,” he said, explaining that the city must adopt procedures to protect those records.
Just minutes after the state concluded their meeting, the city began its own.
Dawn Sandow, the deputy executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, said now that the state has finally granted its approval of the software, the city can finalize all of its procedures, including the security protocol, to administer the first citywide ranked-choice voting primary. Those procedures will be presented to the city commissioners for a vote next Tuesday.
Another issue the city BOE considered was when it will present results from the primary election, including unofficial election night results and subsequent ranked-choice tallies.
“In order to do this in the right way, we need to balance the public’s right to know who won the election and the individual voter’s right to cast absentee and affidavit ballots,” said Fred Umane, the Republican commissioner from Manhattan and the city BOE’s president.
Read More: It Might Be Mid-July Before We Know Primary Winners. Here’s What Could Make It Even Later
As it always does, the city BOE plans to release unofficial election night results when the polls close on Tuesday, June 22nd, which will include the results based on in-person voting during the early voting period (June 12th - June 20th) and on Primary Day. City elections officials do not plan to run ranked-choice tallies on Primary Night.
The first ranked-choice tallies using the UCR software will be conducted approximately a week after the election, June 29th, once all the election-scanner machines are returned from the city’s 1,200 poll sites to their respective borough warehouses.
Beginning the evening of Primary Day, city election officials will post the number of absentee ballots mailed out and returned with daily updates through June 29th, the last day a valid absentee ballot can be received. However, recent changes to state law that would allow a voter to fix certain absentee ballot mistakes means that “cured” absentee ballots could still be coming in as late as July 9th, with final results not expected until the week of July 12th.
As of Tuesday, the city has mailed out more than 126,000 absentee ballots for the upcoming primary election.
So far, the city BOE said it will not release what’s called the “cast-vote record” until after the primary results are certified, which could be several weeks after the primary. The cast-vote record shows the results based on how voters ranked all their choices and it is what’s used when compiling the ranked-choice voting results.
Voting rights advocate Susan Lerner of Common Cause New York said her organization was urging the city to release a partial cast-vote record, which would reflect in-person voting, a week after the election so voters, media outlets, watchdog agencies, and campaigns could run their own results too. The city BOE has not yet agreed to that step.
Tagged
mayoral race
ranked choice voting
election 2021
Brigid Bergin
Brigid Bergin is an award-winning senior reporter on the People and Power desk. She is fiercely committed to telling stories that help people engage and support democracy. In 2022, she hosted a live, ten-week call-in politics show ahead of the midterm elections called The People's Guide to Power. Brigid's reporting in 2017 included some of the first coverage of a political newcomer now known as AOC. In 2016, she broke the news of a voter purge in Brooklyn just days before New York’s presidential primary, triggering city, state and federal investigations. Brigid also guest hosts The Brian Lehrer Show and All Of It. She graduated from the University at Albany and the CUNY Newmark School of Journalism. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-723-4719.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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