Confused, I thought we found out last year that machine counting and absentee voting in the US were incredibly robust systems that nobody need worry about, or baselessly question. Now we hear about a single city count error that is actually several times larger than the entire national margin of victory in the last presidential election?
Ranked Choice Voting is seen as a panacea to two party politics and polarization. Only time will tell if it actually helps this. But no matter how you feel about it, RCV is demonstrably more complicated than FPTP. And to address that complexity you need more bureaucrats, volunteers, software, and machines to tally and certify the results. In every step of the process you introduce more opportunities for error, and if we're being honest, fraud. And, New York City is well known for machine politics, corruption, and cronyism.
Why the fuck this shit happens in USA again and again? I'm from Italy, an almost failed state, and still we can count votes. Paper votes, btw, and yes, we have and use ID
New York has had a host of election related struggles this year. In July of last year they had to invalidate 20% of votes in a primary race: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/one-five-mail-bal...
Two comments:
1. Is it seriously that difficult to just count votes? Why does this keep happening.
2. How can a decision even be made with so many absentee votes? Surely those could change who's eliminated and thus, the entire election.
This vote is used by integration tests only
Apparently there's a CNN article about this here: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/29/politics/nyc-mayoral-race...
Absolutely terrible timing for this type of mistake. If there's anything positive that can be said about it, it's that they owned up to the mistake despite how bad it makes them look especially in context of last year's election.
New York is vying to displace Florida as the USA's poster child for "just because a state is big doesn't mean it can hold an election".
They forgot to disable "Test Mode" from the previous election in Nov 2020
Now do Pennsylvania and Arizona.
this got chased off the front page right fast -- can't let anything that challenges the statist propaganda gain any mind share.
people don't understand how managed the front page of HN is.
The experience with mail in voting and RCV in NYC is a textbook example of “in theory theory and practice are the same, but in practice they’re different.” RCV is undoubtedly a superior voting model to FPTP. And making it easier to vote is good too. But does it feel as decisive and reliable to your average non-college graduate as a FPTP election where results come down the same day?
The most important consideration for elections, of course, is not theoretical optimality, but whether they are perceived as fair and secure.
Conveniently the test votes had real candidate name instead of Pokemon or something, also conveniently test votes were posted into production database, not QA.