Want to follow along with the counting of second- and third-choice votes in the Minneapolis mayor’s race?
If you’re a political junkie with the time — and the patience — you have a couple of options for following the laborious process:
• The Uptake is live-streaming the count here.
• And the city is keeping track here. (In round 2, for example, they first allocated the second-place votes of those whose first-place vote went to a write-in. Betsy Hodges gained 21 votes, and Mark Andrew gained 16.)
Whatever happened to batch elimination ?
The city’s tabulation process is exhaustively walking through each round with the goal of eliminating only one candidate per round.
Whereas “batch elimination” permits the simultaneous defeat or elimination of all candidates remaining in a round who have no mathematical possibility of winning the election, the process in use laboriously counts those candidates over and over. At this point in time, it has gone through 14 rounds to eliminate 14 candidates .
It appears obvious that at least 25 of the mayoral candidates could be eliminated in the 1st round of voting based upon applying the “no mathematical possiblity of winning” rule (see below). My main question here is why the process described on the City of Minneapolis site is not being followed…
At http://vote.minneapolismn.gov/rcv/index.htm, batch elimination is described in this way:
“If no candidate received more than the required threshold of first choice votes, the ranked choice process kicks in. The candidate who received the lowest number of votes is eliminated, along with any candidates who have no mathematical possibility of winning. Their votes are reallocated based on the second-choice votes on those ballots.”
…and again, at http://vote.minneapolismn.gov/rcv/what-is-rcv,
“Candidates with no mathematical possibility of winning (including the candidate with the lowest number of first-choice votes) are defeated, and votes for those candidates are transferred to the next ranked candidate on those ballots.”
After downloading the counts for the mayoral candidates and summing all 3 preferential votes (1,2,3) for each candidate…
– the sum represents the HIGHEST POSSIBLE vote total that each candidate could achieve in the contest;
– and calculating comparisons between the top 2 candidates’ #1 preferences;
– noting that Betsy Hodges had 28,935 #1 votes and
– noting that Mark Andrew had 19,584 #1 votes;
Don Samuels was the ONLY additional candidate who could POSSIBLY beat Mark Andrew’s 19,584 #1 votes, since his #1,2, and #3 votes totalled 33,683. So it was mathematically possible that he could beat Mark Andrews and Betsy Hodges in succeeding rounds of tabulation.
But going down the list of #1,2, and #3 vote totals in the remaining candidates, the next highest was Jackie Cherryhomes at 18,039 – not enough to beat the #1 votes of either Betsy Hodges or Mark Andrew. Even if Hodges and Andrews didn’t get a SINGLE #2 preference nor a SINGLE #3 preference, Ms. Cherryhomes could not beat them with all of her votes. All candidates lower in this same kind of total obviously could not beat Hodges nor Andrew, either. E.g., Cam Winton’s highest possible total came to 15,236 and Bob Fine’s came to 10,351. And it’s all downhill from there.
Candidates whose summed 1st + 2nd + 3rd preference votes are lower than the single #1 preference votes of either of the top 2 cannot possibly win the election.
So it appears that the city’s data on vote totals for mayor show only 3 candidates who could possibly win the election: Hodges, Andrew, and Samuels. All the others are virtually defeated.
Someone please point out any error in the logic you see here.