Does it matter if elections aren’t called on Election Night?

Sarah John

July 22, 2021

(reposted from sarahejohn.com) 

In the weeks that followed New York City's municipal elections in June 2021, much was made of the fact that the mayoral race could not be called on Election Night, or for several days after. In combination with a mistake on the part of the Board of Elections (to include a deck of test ballots in the first official published count of ballots), these delays have served to cast doubt on the electoral process in NYC and on the new electoral system – ranked-choice voting (RCV) – that was used for the first time there. 

We've gotten used to unofficial projections of winners on Election Night. And we tend to conflate these unofficial projections by AP or CNN with official election results and certified winners. But the latter have always taken a long time to compile. And the former take longer the more competitive the contest is and the more ballots there are left to count.

There is good reason to expect Election Night unofficial projections will become less and less common.

In recent years, more of us are voting by mail, and these ballots can take longer to count. Many of us live in states with generous deadlines for ballot return. In some states, ballots postmarked by Election Day are counted even if they are actually received by election officials weeks after Election Day.

Proportionally fewer ballots are counted on Election Night than in the past – with many mail ballots still to arrive after polls close. Furthermore, the ballots that are counted on Election Day are not necessarily representative of the totality of ballots that are received.

This means it is getting trickier to call races.

Given the trend toward convenience voting shows no signs of reversing, delayed unofficial election projections will soon be the new normal.

By contrast, official certified election results take about the same time they always have, with certification happening weeks after Election Day.

Where does RCV fit in all of this? Pretty peripherally.

RCV can affect the official certification of election results – pushing back certification in places like Maine where the law prohibits the electronic transmission of voter data. But there are administrative processes that can prevent RCV from having this effect.

When it comes to Election Night projections, RCV can have a more significant delaying effect, but only in highly competitive contests that were unlikely to be called straight away anyway.

In races where no candidate has a significant plurality of the votes, projecting the winner is more difficult than it would be under plurality. This is because it's very difficult to predict preference flows in RCV races, and that difficulty is exacerbated by our total lack of data on how New York voters were likely to use RCV.

In the absence of a clear majority, no one could safely project Eric Adams as the winner in the NYC mayoral race. No one had any idea how he fared with voters of minor candidates Shaun Donovan, Dianne Morales, or even Andrew Yang. No one knew whether these voters preferred Adams to Maya D. Wiley or Kathryn A. Garcia or even ranked him on their ballots.

Plenty of other races could be called on Election Night, notwithstanding RCV.

But, in the mayoral contest we had no clear winner, with more votes for the second and third-placed candidates collectively than for the first-placed candidate.

That's an unusual occurrence.

But it’s also one of the rare situations in which RCV can produce different winners than plurality and find the candidate with the majority support. Only in rare situations like these does RCV seriously delay unofficial projections of winners until the vast majority of ballots – including mail ballots – are received.

The official results in NYC will be certified according to their usual schedule, with little fanfare and far away from the headlines.