Alternative Voting - Election Procedure - Counting Logistics

Counting Logistics

Most IRV elections historically have been tallied by hand, including in elections to Australia's House of Representatives and most state governments. In the modern era, voting equipment can be used to administer the count either partially or fully.

In Australia, the returning officer now usually declares the two candidates that are most likely to win each seat. The votes are always counted by hand at the polling booth monitored by scrutineers from each candidate. The first part of the count is to record the first choice for all candidates. Votes for candidates other than the two likely winners are then allocated to them in a second pass. The whole process of counting the votes by hand and allocating preferences is typically completed within a two hours on election night at a cost of $7.68 per elector in 2010 to run the entire election.

(The declaration by the returning officer is simply to optimize the counting process. In the unlikely event that the returning officer is wrong and a third candidate wins then the votes would simply have to be counted a third time.)

Ireland in its presidential elections has several dozen counting centers around the nation. Each center reports its totals and receives instructions from the central office about which candidate or candidates to eliminate in the next round of counting based on which candidate is in last place. The count typically is completed the day after the election, as in 1997.

In the United States, California cities such as Oakland and San Francisco administer IRV elections on voting machines, with optical scanning machines recording preferences and software tallying the IRV algorithm. Cary, North Carolina's pilot program in 2007 tallied first choices on optical scan equipment at the polls and then used a central hand-count for the IRV tally. Portland, Maine in 2011 was due to use its usual voting machines to tally first choice at the polls, then a central scan with different equipment if an IRV tally was necessary.