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San Francisco uses both paper ballots and single transferable voting (in its single-winner, instant runoff voting form). Indeed, I believe all jurisdictions in
by stonesixone 11y ago
San Francisco uses both paper ballots and single transferable voting (in its single-winner, instant runoff voting form). Indeed, I believe all jurisdictions in the United States that use STV also use paper ballots.
In San Francisco, voters vote on paper ballots, and the ballots are electronically scanned. This generates a digital representation of the rankings cast on all ballots, which can be fed into tabulation software. SF actually releases these rankings publicly as a text file for each contest. See here, for example:
http://www.sfelections.org/results/20151103/#english_detail http://www.sfelections.org/results/20151103/#english_detail
- Houshalter 11y agoYes it's the vote tallying machine that needs to be electronic, not necessarily the ballot that the voter fills out. But even then, it's harder to do ranked paper ballots. Presumably someone has to transcribe the numbers voters wrote on the ballot into a computer, which introduces room for mistakes and lots of work.
- thwarted 11y agoNone of that requires manually transcribing numbers. Here's what the ranked paper ballot looks like that we use in SF. This is entirely scanable by machine. http://californiawatch.org/files/imagecache/image-full-width/Ranked-choice-voting-sample-ballot_0.jpg http://californiawatch.org/files/imagecache/image-full-width... Notice that it says (hard to read in this image) in the second and third choice that the selection must be different from the other choices.
- Houshalter 11y agoAh, interesting way of doing it. Still a bit messy, and the size of the ballot could grow quadratically with the number of candidates.