In opposition to ranked-choice voting

In opposition to NH HB 345, enabling ranked-choice voting (RCV) for state party primary and municipal elections, and HB 350, establishing procedures for RCV for federal and state offices:

What the well-intentioned proponents of ranked-choice voting overlook is that it conflicts with a much more urgent and critical need for manual auditing to counter the threats of hacking and rigging and the lack of confidence in our voting machines. The complexity of ranked-choice voting would only add to the resistance to hand-counted audits.

Little-understood downside to ranked-choice voting: The RCV component of state and federal races and state party primaries will always have to be tabulated by the Secretary of State or some other state authority on their RCV-programmed central scanner. In NH, that would hold for RCV municipal elections also until local jurisdictions purchase new, RCV-capable machines. Even then, how would the ranked-choice votes for, say, Nashua Aldermen-at-Large be tabulated? By the SoS? Or maybe the city clerk?

How would we audit, let alone recount, the SoS's results? Every legislator who has a vote on RCV should watch at least a portion of the video on RCV auditing [https://youtu.be/OzF-KEMJsHc] by the RCV Resource Center to see what the challenges are. Daunting, to say the least.

RCV advocates contend that it reduces polarization. Traditional runoff elections to reach a majority of votes for the winning candidates are held in a number of states, including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Does anyone see a reduction in divisiveness in those states?

RCV's Achilles’ heel is the requirement for *instant* runoffs, which necessitates central, state-level, computerized tabulation to reallocate losing candidates’ votes. Traditional runoffs, on the other hand, are tabulated just like any other election. Candidates with the lowest vote totals are simply eliminated after a round; their votes are not redirected to surviving candidates. RCV advocates see its strength in exactly this capability to rank candidates. I do understand the appeal, but it comes at the unacceptable cost of local oversight, transparency, auditability, and therefore security.

See also Brad Friedman: "Why Ranked Choice Voting Is a Terrible Idea" at https://bradblog.com/?p=12608: "it's very difficult to count, virtually impossible for the public to oversee, requires central tabulation and computers to pull off, and candidates and voters in many places where it's been tried in the past have found that it's impossible to understand why some candidates won and others lost." Brad notes that Approval Voting is an audit-friendly alternative to reach winners that can attract a majority of votes.

Barbara Glassman
Nashua, NH

PS This article should be required reading: https://www.ktvu.com/news/election-error-in-alameda-county-names-new-winner-in-district-4-race

PPS Brad Friedman wrote of his 2/20/23 Bradcast, beginning at 42 minutes:

“[W]e close with details on voting system failures in both New Jersey and California in November of 2022. In both cases, the systems ended up naming candidates who actually lost to be the winners and vice versa. In Monmouth County, NJ, the ES&S voting tabulators allowed duplicate votes to be uploaded to it twice. It wasn't discovered until last month. In Alameda County, CA, the tabulators were programmed incorrectly to do the impossible math of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) elections in the Bay area. It was discovered in late December last year by a pro-RCV organization who happened to run the math on their own computers and discovered the error.

“In both cases, the errors were discovered after losing candidates were certified as winners. How many places did that happen but wasn't ever discovered, because human beings rarely bother to count ballots to make sure the computers did so accurately. This is what comes of outsourcing public elections to private companies and running elections on computer systems that are virtually impossible to oversee by the American public.”

PPPS Brad Friedman re New York's 2025 Democratic mayoral primary: "Beyond the politics, however, we focus today on the voting method now used in NYC's Mayoral elections, specifically Ranked Choice Voting, how it works (and/or doesn't), its dangers (as I see them) to American democracy, and an alternative form of voting (Approval Voting) that solves many of the concerns that RCV proponents care about, without risking disenfranchisement and loss public oversight of election results. Tune in for this one, if you ever wondered what RCV was all about, liked the idea, or hated it." At 18:57 minutes: https://bradblog.com/?p=15426