September 2023: Reporting Ranked Choice Voting Election Results with Outstanding Ballots

To improve transparency in the reporting of RCV election results, Alborz Jelvani, a Rutgers CS graduate student, and I presented an algorithm to process partial results of RCV races without requiring all votes to be gathered before the counting can start at the 10th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2022). Our approach considers known voter preferences from tallied ballots to identify possible elimination orderings and takes into account the uncertainty associated with still-missing (e.g., absentee) ballots. Our algorithm allows for identifying candidates who still have a path to victory, and those who do not, as soon as election night, providing stakeholders with more transparency on the election outcome. Highlights of our results on data from the June 2021 Primary election can be found here:

https://medium.com/algorithms-in-the-wild/reporting-ranked-choice-voting-election-results-with-outstanding-ballots-607d653ce21b