October 6th, 2021

Slingshot Strategies LLC

How To Pick A Winner? press@slingshotstrat.com
New York, New York
By Kate Eckerle
The June 2021 New York City primary elections marked the City’s first use of Ranked Choice Voting. Slingshot
Strategies evaluated the preferential voting system’s performance according to democratic metrics, both in this election
and in counterfactuals based on it (see subsections 2.1 and 2.2, respectively). The question of how Boards of Elections
might handle certain ballot errors in close elections is also explored (see subsection 3.2).
All data processing and analysis, including extraction of the mayoral race from the Cast Vote Record, subsequent data
parsing, RCV reallocation, pairwise comparisons, etc., was performed in-house by Slingshot Strategies. We reproduced
the Board of Elections’ certified vote counts in all rounds of RCV with our reallocation algorithm by treating overvotes
in a specific way. This is described in subsection 3.1.

Summary
Plurality voting can result in anti-majoritarian outcomes when three or more candidates are on the
ballot. Alternative ways of voting, like Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), have been proposed as a means
of producing more democratic results. All start from more complete information about the electorate’s
views because they ask voters to express several preferences on their ballot. In RCV the preferential
ballot voters are asked to fill out takes the form of an ordering of the candidates from best to worst.
In other words, a ranking.
Formal criteria exist for evaluating the soundness of different voting systems, some of which involve
the notion of pairwise comparisons between candidates — who voters would prefer in a head-to-head
— for all candidate pairings. If there is a candidate who would beat every other candidate in a one-
on-one, they are called the “Condorcet winner.” A Condorcet winner isn’t guaranteed to exist in every
instance of preferential voting though (see section 1).
Adams may not have been a “majority winner” (winner of a majority of rank 1s), but was he
nevertheless a Condorcet winner? How would the runners-up have fared against each other in one-
on-ones? What would the RCV rounds have looked like if Stringer had made it past Yang, or Yang
past Garcia? The release of the Cast Vote Record (CVR) by the City Board of Elections makes it
possible to answer to these questions, we do so in section 2. Their answers provide a fuller picture of
the electorate’s preferences, and in turn a measure of the efficacy of RCV in reflecting it. Some results
in brief are:
• This RCV election indeed had a Condorcet winner and it was in fact Adams. Moreover, the order of elimination
found by RCV coincides with the order of shrinking loss margins against Adams in a head-to-head; Stringer loses
to him by 235,333 votes, Yang by 198,328, Wiley by 77,502, and Garcia by 7,197.

• The six head-to-heads involving only the four runners-up in RCV are won by whichever candidate in the pair was
eliminated later in RCV, with one exception: Wiley vs Garcia. Wiley beats Garcia in a one-on-one, despite the
fact that Garcia made it past her in the RCV.

• Adams had the broadest and strongest support. He should have won the election, and RCV correctly identified
him as the winner. Moreover, the ordering of the top five candidates found by RCV was logical given their depth
and breadth of support.

• Spoiler effects cannot be engineered in the RCV by dropping Adams, by dropping Garcia, or by dropping Yang
from the start of RCV. RCV performed in a robust fashion in this election, and in the three hypothetical scenarios
we generated from it.

• It is not plausible that candidate selections that were ignored on overvote ballots could have changed the final
outcome of the election (see subsection 3.1).

1
1 Voting Systems
When a population has two options to choose between (to fill an office with candidate A or B, to
enact or reject by referendum proposed legislation, etc), it is unambiguous how to decide the matter
democratically. Record the preference of each member of the population. Whichever option acquires
the most votes is the winner in democracy.
But when there are three or more options to choose among, the method described above — plurality
voting — can result in anti-majoritarian outcomes. At a most basic level this is because each voter’s
views on a matter involving 3+ options cannot possibly be captured completely by a single piece
of information (one preference, their favorite). Giving voters the opportunity to rank the available
options allows them to express themselves more fully1 .
For example, suppose the meal for a group is being decided democratically out of fish, chicken,
and tofu. If you like fish, find that chicken is alright, and detest tofu, your full views are not reflected
by a single vote (for your favorite, fish). Say, 33% of the group votes chicken, 32% votes fish, and
35% votes tofu. Everyone will wind up with tofu in a plurality voting system regardless of what the
alternative choices of the three factions would have been.
Several voting systems have been designed to counteract such effects. Ranked Choice Voting is
one. All begin from and utilize more complete information about each voter’s views (for example, their
ranked preferences). A voting system amounts to a set of rules, a deterministic method for processing
the voters’ rankings as a group and producing a societal ordering of the candidates. In plurality voting
only the rank 1 information of voters factors into the outcome.
Different voting systems can be compared formally as theoretical structures based on whether
they are guaranteed to pass certain criteria that are desirable from the standpoint of reflecting the
majority will in their outcome. For instance, suppose that in the fish/chicken/tofu example everyone
who voted for fish as their favorite also says they prefer chicken over tofu as a second choice, and
everyone who picked chicken as their favorite likewise prefers fish over tofu. Plurality voting would
deem tofu the winner despite the fact that both alternatives are preferred over it by a majority — in
this case 65%. This is an example of how plurality voting can fail the majority loser criterion. More
extreme examples are possible when the number of options is greater.
For a majority to be served their least preferred entree is a meaningless inconvenience, but when
it comes to electing a candidate for office the analogous situation is disconcerting: a majority of the
population being governed by the candidate they think is worst. Ranked Choice Voting never produces
such an outcome; it passes the “majority loser” criterion, which can be stated in general as:

If a majority favors every other candidate over a given candidate, the voting system should not pick
the given candidate as the winner.

In fact, Ranked Choice Voting satisfies a stronger condition that can be viewed as a generalization
of the above, the “mutual majority” criterion:

If a subset S of candidates exists such that a majority of voters prefers every member in S over every
candidate outside of S, the winner found by the voting system should be a member of S.

1
Technically one kind of view is left out by a ranked ballot — two or more candidates being viewed equally favorably
by a voter for a rank that is not lowest. However, the voter can express indifference to multiple least preferred candidates
by omitting them from their ballot. Nevertheless, a ranked ballot carries more information than the single selection a
voter makes on a plurality voting ballot.

2
This is in essence a statement that the voting system should lead to the formation of coalitions
of voters (through their ballots) when their rankings are similar but not necessarily identical. The
majority loser criterion is the special case of the mutual majority criterion when S is the entire set of
candidates except one.
What about ballot exhaustion? Ranked Choice Voting elections are often carried out using a
trimmed down set of rankings, and/or allowing voters to leave blank entries on the ballot. This
was the case in the June 22nd NYC Democratic primary for Mayor, where a total of 13 candidates
were listed on the ballot and voters were only asked to rank up to five. The inevitable omission of
candidates’ names on some ballots can make winning in head-to-head comparisons with the explicit
support of over half the electorate an excessively high threshold. In such RCV elections, a subset of
candidates all of whom beat every candidate outside the subset and do so with the explicit support
of 50+% of voters in each head-to-head may not exist, but exist when the 50+% threshold is relaxed.
Candidate A can beat B in a head-to-head comparison with less than 50+% of the vote because of
voters who choose not to rank A or B.
The loser in all head-to-head comparisons, if one exists, is called the Condorcet loser. The winner
in all head-to-head comparisons, if one exists, is called the Condorcet winner. If one does not, a
smallest subset all of who are winners in direct comparisons against those outside the subset does,
and is known as the Smith set. For example, pairwise comparisons among the top three performers
can exhibit a rock-paper-scissors dynamic and prohibit the field from being whittled down any further
than three.
Ranked Choice Voting satisfies the Condorcet loser criterion — the winner of an RCV election
will never be a Condorcet loser — but the winner is not necessarily guaranteed to be the Condorcet
winner when one exists, or to be in the Smith set more generally when one doesn’t. So-called “spoiler
effects” of this sort can occur in RCV when a candidate with broad support at lower rankings gets
eliminated too soon for that support to manifest. RCV penalizes candidates for having too much
of their support in a tepid form; enough ardent support is needed to escape elimination. That’s
not necessarily a bad thing, as it might push candidates to provide more compelling platforms while
maintaining the necessity of appealing to the public broadly due to transfer votes, and maintaining
some of the democratic safeguards mentioned.
Several other useful criteria exist for evaluating voting systems. They are beyond the scope of this
piece, but we note an interesting fact: a particular but comprehensive set of the criteria2 that appear
reasonable to require of voting systems turn out to be mutually incompatible. In other words, any
preferential voting system cannot be guaranteed to satisfy all the criteria in all instances. This result
has been proven and is known as Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. The incompatibility involves the
fact that whereas an electorate can express cyclical preferences (like the rock-paper-scissors example),
the output of a preferential voting system is a single ordering of all the candidates (in RCV the order
of elimination). The Impossibility Theorem should serve to moderate the demands we impose on a
voting system.
In sum, RCV starts from more complete information and aggregates commonly held views on
candidate favorability/acceptibility. It allows coalitions to form naturally, and its outcome is designed
to reflect population-wide preferences in a more robust fashion than plurality voting is. With the
movement to adopt it as a more democratic means of running elections gaining steam, Slingshot
Strategies analyzed the Cast Vote Record data released by the NYC Board Of Elections, focusing on
the Democratic mayoral primary.
2
Non-dictatorship, Pareto Efficiency, Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, Social Ordering, and Unrestricted Do-
main.

3
2 Robustness of Adams’s Win
2.1 Pairwise Comparisons
Only one head-to-head comparison that includes all voters is captured by RCV — namely that between
the last two candidates standing — in this case Adams and Garcia. Adams’s total in the final round
(404,513 votes) reflects 42.9% of the number of ballots that were active at the start of RCV, whereas
Garcia’s (397,316 votes) reflects 42.2%. The remaining 14.9% consists of exhausted ballots — ballots
that were active in round 1 but expressed no preference between Adams and Garcia (140,202 voters).
Would he have beaten every candidate in a one-on-one?
We tallied up the preferences of voters in head-to-head comparisons of the mayoral candidates
using the ballots in the CVR. We assumed that the relative rankings of the candidates, and/or their
inclusion versus exclusion on a voter’s ballot, was indicative of the voter’s preference between the two.
For example, we interpret the ballot:

1. Adams, 2. W iley

with ranks 3 through 5 blank as meaning the voter preferred Adams over everyone else, Wiley over
everyone but Adams, and had no preference between the remaining candidates.
A total of 10,330 Democratic mayoral ballots contained “overvote” entries. An overvote is an
instance where a voter bubbles in more than one candidate for a single rank (presumably by accident).
The matter of how to deal with ballots containing overvotes is technical and their effect in this election
was negligible. We postpone most discussion of them until section 3 but make one remark now: we
considered two ways of handling overvotes in calculating head-to-head tallies. One is the way that is
appropriate for running RCV (everything below the overvote is ignored), this yields the pairwise counts
given in this section in table 1 and figure 1. The second way is best thought of as a projection that
seeks to include information from the bottom portions of overvote ballots by making an assumption 3 .
In every head-to-head, the projection impacts the preferences attained by the two candidates in the
match by an insignificant amount (on the order of thousandths of a percent). For completeness the
counts obtained using the second approach are given at the end of section 3 in table 6 and figure 4. In
all tables and figures we only show the results of pairings drawn from the top five candidates in the
RCV, as these represent the most competitive matches.
Each pie chart in figure 1 shows a distinct pairing of candidates, say, A and B for the purposes
of discussion. The fraction of voters who prefer A over B is shown by the slice filled with candidate
A’s color, while the fraction that prefer B over A is shown by the slice shaded in candidate B’s color.
Voters who express no preference between A and B make up the remainder of ballots in the head-
to-head and are shown in light gray. For example, the head-to-head between Adams and Wiley is
shown in the second pie chart from the left in the first row. Those who prefer Adams over Wiley are
represented by the red slice (Adams’s color), while those who prefer Wiley over Adams are represented
by the purple slice (Wiley’s color). (The “no preference” portions vary across the pie charts because
the number of voters who do not rank either of the candidates paired against each other differs across
the match-ups.)
Adams wins against every other candidate in the top five, as slice is bigger than that of each
competitor in every pie (top row of figure 1). He also beats all earlier eliminated candidates. Therefore,
this RCV election indeed had a Condorcet winner and it was in fact Adams. Moreover, the order of
3
The assumption is that the candidates bubbled in simultaneously by a voter for a single rank (appearing in the CVR
dataset with the generic label: “overvote”) are not repeated further down their ballot as correctly entered names (i.e.
unmasked). It is one way to model voter mistakes. See section 3.

4
elimination resulting from RCV reallocation coincides with the order of shrinking loss margins against
Adams in a head-to-head for the top five, as Stringer loses to him by 235,333 votes, Yang by 198,328,
Wiley by 77,502, and Garcia by 7,1974 .
The six head-to-heads involving only the four runners-up in RCV are won by whichever candidate
in the pair was eliminated later in RCV with one exception: Wiley vs Garcia. Wiley beats Garcia in a
one-on-one despite the fact that Garcia made it past her in the RCV. It is also true that when Adams
is excluded Wiley wins all of her head-to-heads. This means that there is also a Condorcet winner
in a world without Adams, namely Wiley. The structure exhibited in the four pairwise comparisons
against Adams is reproduced in the five head-to-heads involving Wiley or Garcia against Yang or
Stringer; Stringer loses to Garcia and to Wiley by more than Yang does, and Yang beats Stringer.
Additionally, Wiley beats both Yang and Stringer by (much) more than she beats Garcia.

Pairwise Comparisons: Vote Totals Using RCV Treatment For Overvotes

vs. Garcia vs. Wiley vs. Yang vs. Stringer
Adams (404513, 397316, 140202) (434905, 357403, 149723) (447666, 249338, 245027) (474155, 238822, 229054)
Garcia — (356378, 364791, 220862) (427925, 262472, 251634) (453115, 204194, 284722)
Wiley — (436397, 295231, 210403) (436215, 216975, 288841)
Yang — (340808, 285807, 315416)

Table 1: Head-to-head preference counts computed using RCV treatment for overvotes. Each triplet
consists of (left to right): 1. the preferences for the row candidate over the column candidate, 2. the
preferences for the column candidate over the row candidate), and 3. those who ranked neither.

Pairwise Comparisons
vs. Garcia vs. Wiley vs. Yang vs. Stringer
Adams 50.45% to 49.55% 54.89% to 45.11% 64.23% to 35.77% 66.50% to 33.50%
Garcia — 49.42% to 50.83% 61.98% to 38.02% 68.93% to 31.07%
Wiley — 59.65% to 40.35% 66.78% to 33.22%
Yang — 54.39% to 45.61%

Table 2: Share of voters who prefer candidate A (row label) to B (column label) computed only out
of those who express a preference one way or the other, (i.e. with a denominator excludes voters who
rank neither A nor B).

2.2 Counterfactual Scenarios

Reallocating Adams’s rank 1s by force at the start of RCV results in Wiley and Garcia being the
final two competitors, and therefore with final round vote totals identical to the Wiley vs Garcia
head-to-head. Yang and Stringer’s poor performances against Wiley and Garcia in their respective
one-on-ones are a strong suggestion this would have been the case, but we confirmed it by triggering
Adams’s elimination at the start of RCV.
4
With the projection for exhausted overvotes Garcia loses by 7,160 votes, Wiley by 77,503, Yang by 198,402, and
Stringer by 235,360.

5
 Pairwise Comparisons
∗using RCV treatment for overvotes∗

Figure 1: Pairwise comparisons for top five candidates. Each pie chart shows the fraction of voters
that preferred A over B in the color associated with candidate A, and vice-versa for the those who
preferred candidate B over A. Voters who did not express a preference between A and B are shown
in light gray. Raw vote totals given in parentheses, and their corresponding percentages outside each
slice.
6
 RCV Without Adams

Figure 2: Left: Next choices of Adams’s rank 1 votes, the asterisked slice signifies write-in candidates.
Right: RCV rounds for “no Adams” scenario.

The left panel of figure 2 shows how Adams’s votes (in the form of rank 1s) redistribute among
the remaining 12 candidates (plus write-ins), and the exhaust category. Wiley would inherit 20.3%,
whereas Garcia would only receive 11.6%. The rounds of RCV in this “no Adams” scenario are shown
on the right in figure 2. The lead Wiley would gain over Garcia from Adams’s rank 1s in this world
is responsible for her ultimate win. Garcia would inherit more of Yang’s votes than Wiley when he
is eliminated (as Garcia did in the actual “with Adams world” on June 22nd) but not a sufficient
amount for her to overtake Wiley in the end. The RCV counts are given in table 3. The fact that
Wiley would win the RCV if Adams is eliminated is another measure of the efficacy of RCV: even in
the hypothetical “no Adams” world RCV selects the Condorcet winner.
The results of two similar RCV counterfactuals for Yang and Stringer are shown in figure 3. In the
actual vote of June 22nd Yang was eliminated in the Final Four round. We forced his promotion ahead
one round by reallocating the rank 1 votes of Garcia at the start of RCV (subsequent vote counts by
round are given in table 4). We generated the analogous scenario for Stringer, who was eliminated
just before Yang in the certified results of the June 22nd vote, by reallocating Yang’s rank 1 votes at
the start (vote counts by round are given in table 5). Plots of the top five candidates’ vote shares in
the RCV rounds for the “no Garcia” scenario are shown on the left in figure 3 and those of the “no
Yang” scenario on the right.
The advantage given to Yang and to Stringer in each scenario unsurprisingly proves insufficient
for them to advance any further than this single extra round. The forced reallocation of Garcia’s rank
1s at the start just delays Yang’s elimination by one round, and the same for Stringer when Yang’s
rank 1s are reallocated instead. Moreover, they each lose by larger margins in these rounds than the
competitors of the actual Final Three and Final Four rounds did in the certified primary results. In
the actual vote, Wiley is eliminated in the Final Three round on account of being shy 12,204 votes of
Garcia. In the “no Garcia” scenario, Yang is eliminated in the Final Three round on account of being

7
 RCV Without Adams
Adams Wiley Garcia Yang Stringer Morales McGuire Donovan Foldenauer Chang Prince Taylor Wright Jr. Write-in
289, 403 201, 127 184, 463 115, 130 51, 778 26, 495 25, 242 23, 167 7, 742 7, 048 3, 964 2, 662 2, 242 1, 568
0 259, 911 218, 134 159, 967 73, 912 34, 717 51, 480 43, 345 9, 167 9, 179 4, 848 5, 970 5, 019 1, 903
0 260, 004 218, 280 160, 217 74, 017 34, 772 51, 542 43, 385 9, 192 9, 204 4, 904 6, 004 5, 042 0
0 261, 799 218, 694 160, 570 74, 292 35, 282 51, 710 43, 524 9, 282 9, 565 0 6, 136 5, 138 0
0 262, 728 218, 958 161, 211 74, 636 35, 583 52, 199 44, 086 9, 404 9, 644 0 6, 545 0 0
0 263, 880 219, 614 161, 917 75, 124 36, 473 52, 722 44, 495 9, 572 9, 911 0 0 0 0
0 264, 633 220, 297 162, 636 76, 305 38, 587 53, 553 44, 831 0 10, 272 0 0 0 0
0 266, 838 221, 559 164, 939 76, 977 39, 771 53, 978 45, 425 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 280, 873 229, 027 168, 571 81, 093 0 56, 572 46, 877 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 289, 896 237, 726 176, 628 88, 575 0 62, 597 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 305, 161 251, 087 188, 822 96, 903 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 330, 553 279, 792 205, 928 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 364, 791 356, 378 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Table 3: Vote totals in RCV following forced reallocation of Adams’s rank 1s at the start. Rounds
increase from top to bottom.

Figure 3: Left: RCV rounds for “no Garcia” scenario. Right: RCV rounds for “no Yang” scenario.

shy 135,205 votes of Wiley, over ten times wider a margin. Similarly, while in the actual vote of June
22nd Yang was eliminated on account of being shy 87,948 votes of Garcia in the Final Four round, the
“no Yang” scenario has Stringer being eliminated in the Final Four round with the larger loss margin
of 180,613 votes. Adams wins the RCV election in the “no Garcia” world and the “no Yang” world.
Again, RCV has selected the Condorcet winner.
No matter how you look at it, Adams had the broadest and strongest support. He should have
won the election, and RCV correctly identified him as the winner. Moreover, the order in which the
other candidates were eliminated was logical given their depth and breadth of support. Broadening
the scope beyond the mayoral primary and the three hypotheticals we generated from it, we note that
analysis conducted independently by FairVote shows that all NYC RCV primary races were won by
Condorcet winners.
Finally, we mention that the head-to-head counts for Wiley vs Garcia computed using the RCV
treatment for overvotes (row 2, column 2 of table 1) exactly match the final round of the RCV we

8
 RCV Without Garcia
Adams Wiley Garcia Yang Stringer Morales McGuire Donovan Foldenauer Chang Prince Taylor Wright Jr. Write-in
289, 403 201, 127 184, 463 115, 130 51, 778 26, 495 25, 242 23, 167 7, 742 7, 048 3, 964 2, 662 2, 242 1, 568
317, 331 250, 456 0 141, 718 82, 360 31, 980 38, 088 41, 286 8, 231 8, 351 4, 526 3, 336 2, 444 1, 642
317, 557 250, 538 0 141, 913 82, 453 32, 029 38, 123 41, 320 8, 250 8, 373 4, 575 3, 358 2, 458 0
318, 036 250, 902 0 142, 158 82, 585 32, 177 38, 292 41, 473 8, 319 8, 407 4, 635 3, 475 0 0
318, 489 251, 518 0 142, 492 82, 787 32, 715 38, 464 41, 641 8, 415 8, 584 4, 718 0 0 0
318, 764 253, 491 0 142, 852 83, 104 33, 282 38, 583 41, 766 8, 493 8, 972 0 0 0 0
319, 450 254, 119 0 143, 460 84, 120 35, 236 39, 248 42, 085 0 9, 299 0 0 0 0
320, 326 256, 527 0 145, 400 84, 805 36, 354 39, 537 42, 684 0 0 0 0 0 0
324, 291 271, 753 0 148, 800 88, 933 0 41, 700 44, 274 0 0 0 0 0 0
336, 383 277, 201 0 156, 573 93, 622 0 0 50, 526 0 0 0 0 0 0
346, 249 287, 355 0 166, 968 105, 173 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
370, 154 321, 624 0 186, 419 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
434, 905 357, 403 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Table 4: Vote totals in RCV following the forced reallocation of Garcia’s rank 1s at the start. Rounds
increase from top to bottom.

RCV Without Yang

Adams Wiley Garcia Yang Stringer Morales McGuire Donovan Foldenauer Chang Prince Taylor Wright Jr. Write-in
289, 403 201, 127 184, 463 115, 130 51, 778 26, 495 25, 242 23, 167 7, 742 7, 048 3, 964 2, 662 2, 242 1, 568
315, 773 209, 637 212, 856 0 58, 438 29, 604 29, 574 28, 429 8, 993 15, 282 4, 844 3, 558 2, 777 1, 757
316, 040 209, 711 213, 010 0 58, 533 29, 652 29, 615 28, 461 9, 016 15, 322 4, 902 3, 580 2, 796 0
316, 600 210, 106 213, 199 0 58, 700 29, 829 29, 810 28, 638 9, 097 15, 398 4, 983 3, 729 0 0
317, 127 210, 634 213, 674 0 58, 894 30, 282 29, 977 28, 849 9, 207 15, 679 5, 081 0 0 0
317, 429 212, 511 214, 201 0 59, 207 30, 865 30, 138 28, 972 9, 307 16, 186 0 0 0 0
318, 141 213, 147 214, 874 0 60, 334 32, 914 30, 834 29, 262 0 16, 832 0 0 0 0
320, 065 215, 920 217, 455 0 61, 856 34, 812 31, 592 30, 323 0 0 0 0 0 0
325, 743 220, 107 225, 148 0 66, 644 36, 073 33, 951 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
335, 649 224, 223 234, 043 0 69, 770 37, 694 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
339, 671 238, 316 242, 064 0 74, 115 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
354, 657 254, 728 266, 932 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
404, 513 0 397, 316 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Table 5: Vote totals in RCV following the forced reallocation of Yang’s rank 1s at the start. Rounds
increase from top to bottom.

generated by triggering Adams’s elimination at the outset (bottom row of table 3), as they ought to5 .
This serves as another self-consistency check, in addition to the match between the final round of RCV
on Election Day and the Adams vs Garcia head-to-head for this treatment of overvotes (first column
and first row of table 1).

3 Overvotes
3.1 Treatment in RCV
The Cast Vote Record released by the BOE (in the form of 24 excel files downloadable here:
https://vote.nyc/page/election-results-summary#p0) contained “overvote” entries. The standard rules
5
These must match provided the reallocation of Adams’s rank 1s does not result in another candidate overtaking
Garcia or Wiley, which in this case it does not. See table 3.

9
of RCV operate under the assumption that each rank is filled with at most one candidate’s name. If
a ballot needs to be transferred due to a voter’s current top-choice having been eliminated, but the
voter has marked two (or more) candidates’ that are still competing as their next rank, to whom do
you give the vote?
In the dataset such ballots appear without the names of the multiple candidates selected for the
same rank shown. For example, a ballot containing an overvote might look (qualitatively) like this in
the CVR:
1. W iley, 2. overvote, 3. Garcia
The treatment of ballots containing overvotes that reproduces the BOE’s vote counts in the RCV
rounds is to include the portions of such ballots appearing above first overvote only. In other words,
ballots containing overvotes are chopped at the highest rank in which an overvote occurred, and only
the voter’s correctly bubbled-in rankings above it are incorporated in the RCV process. Note that
this means everyone who overvoted in their rank 1 position was excluded from the get-go, as would
occur in plurality voting.
Chopping ballots at the highest overvote is in fact the fairest approach to use if the identities
of the candidates underlying the overvotes are unknown. It would not be fair to simply skip over
overvotes and allocate the voter’s ballot to the next non-eliminated candidate on their list because
the would-be receiver of the transfer vote might be competing against one (or all) of the unknown
candidates bubbled-in at the overvote rank, which is higher.
For instance, the ballot above cannot fairly be transferred to Garcia upon Wiley’s elimination in
the penultimate round because it is possible that the voter’s ballot looks like this when unmasked:

1. W iley, 2. {Adams, Y ang} 3. Garcia

In the election, Adams was still competing against Garcia when Wiley was eliminated. In this hy-
pothetical where he is one of the voter’s choices in the overvote rank (#2), it would be against the
voter’s wishes to give their vote to the first singly-filled candidate below their overvote, in this case
Garcia (rank #3). There is no choice but to exhaust a ballot once an overvote is reached during RCV
if the identities of the candidates in question are unknown.

Could revealing the choices underlying overvotes result in a different winner?

In theory yes, but by any reasonable measure of plausibility, no.

Although the 10,330 total ballots containing overvotes exceed the margin Garcia lost by (7,197) on
Election Day, 2,954 of these overvote ballots are already allocated to either Adams or Garcia in the
final round (2,025 and 929, respectively). That leaves only 7,376 ballots that rank neither Adams nor
Garcia above the first overvote and therefore theoretically would be up for grabs. Garcia would need
virtually every mistake to go her way, and almost none to go Adams’s, or break even. If you assume
the unknown candidates represented as “overvote” labels are distinct from the named candidates on
the ballots they appear on, the available pool of votes for Garcia shrinks slightly but nevertheless
below her needed amount, to 7,183.
Additionally, ballots containing overvotes predominantly came from residents in Brooklyn (3,184),
the Bronx (2,563), and Queens (2,406). Only 1,839 came from the the borough most favorable to
Garcia, Manhattan. The remaining 338 came from Staten Island.
Overvotes may not have been decisive in this election, but it is conceivable that they could matter
in future elections. In analogy to the way affidavit ballots and recounts are handled in plurality voting

10
elections, a sufficiently tight RCV election it would seem warrants review by election board officials of
all overvote ballots. We contacted the NYC BOE on September 9th and again on September 20th to
ask what, if any, protocol exists concerning the review of overvote ballots in closer elections and their
potential inclusion in the RCV, but received no response.
Suppose a voter bubbles in the wrong candidate, crosses it out, and fills in their intended choice for
that rank. Ballot scanners often record an overvote in that ranking (i.e. as having filled two bubbles),
in contrast to a human reviewing the ballot who would detect and correctly interpret the “X” or other
obvious marking over the mistakenly filled bubble as an indication the voter wanted it to be discarded.
Surely a review by BOE officials, perhaps overseen by a judge as with other ballot review processes,
should be conducted to identify overvote ballots of this sort — where the intent of a voter to rank one
candidate in the overvote position can be discerned.
How to handle the remaining overvote ballots following a review — specifically those where the
intention to rank a single candidate in the overvote position was not expressed by the overvoter, and
instead multiple selections appear in a rank as equally filled — is less obvious. It is certainly true
that without knowledge of the identities of the candidates underlying an overvote (as is the case for
anyone looking at the released CVR data), the only fair approach in performing RCV reallocation is
to ignore everything appearing below an overvote if it is reached. When the identities involved are
known, however, one could argue that two or more filled bubbles in single rank that appear without
indication of the voter’s desire to exclude all but one may nevertheless permit intent that is relevant
to RCV to be discerned.
Take for example the ballot,

1. Stringer, 2. {W iley, Garcia}

If Wiley and Garcia’s bubbles both appear as equally intended choices, it may not be clear whether the
voter meant to rank Wiley above Garcia, or Garcia above Wiley, or truly could not reach a decision
regarding their order as second and third and intentionally selected both for their rank 2, but what
seems reasonable to conclude is that the voter prefers Wiley and Garcia to everyone except Stringer,
who is preferred over the two of them. In this election such a ballot would have been deemed exhausted
upon Stringer’s elimination. We reiterate that the number of votes Garcia lost by to Adams was too
large for it to be realistic that her loss could be attributable to the inactivation of ballots on the
grounds of overvoting (such as the example ballot above). But had Adams’s margin been smaller,
the question of what the fairest way is to treat overvotes that appear as equally sincere and intended
choices in a given rank would be pertinent.
We think it is reasonable to contemplate whether alternative policies to chopping such overvote
ballots can be devised that would be fairer, without compromising the ability to perform RCV re-
allocation. One idea would be to create a new third type of ballot status in RCV: “votes awaiting
reallocation.” When a genuine overvote is reached (meaning a ballot that needs to be allocated but
two or more equally filled bubbles are reached), the ballot would be placed in a waiting area. It would
stay there until only one of the candidates listed in the overvote ranking was competing, at which
point it would be transferred to them.
For the purpose of illustrating how the RCV process supplemented with a holding area would
work, we take the order of elimination in the following examples to be what it was in the certified
results of the June 22nd vote. The point of course is that incorporating reviewed overvote ballots into
RCV (whether only those where the intention to select a single candidate in the overvote rank can be
discerned, or also those where a discernible intention to do so is not present) may change the order of
elimination.

11
 Consider the overvote ballot:

1. W iley, 2. {Adams, Y ang} 3. Garcia

Upon Wiley’s elimination this individual’s vote would immediately be transferred to Adams, but the
ballot:
1. Stringer, 2. {W iley, Garcia}
would be placed in the holding area from the time Stringer is eliminated up until right after Wiley is
eliminated, at which point it would be transferred to Garcia. As opposed to being chopped at the over-
vote, the ballot is kept whole and the rest of the electorate decides as a group (through the reallocation
of their ballots) whom to transfer the overvote ballot to. Additionally, the total number of intended
candidate selections on an overvote ballot (meaning filled bubbles without markings indicating their
exclusion) needs to be limited to whatever the maximum number of rankings was that voters were
allowed to give in the election (in this mayoral primary the limit was five). This is necessary to ensure
that overvoters are not given the ability to identify a larger set of candidates with whom their vote
might end up than non-overvoters. If an overvoter’s ballot contains more than the allowed number of
selections, it should be cut at whatever the lowest ranking is that ensures it satisfies this rule.
An alternative to the holding pen idea would be to simply award fractional votes when a genuine
overvote indicating two or more competing candidates is encountered. Under these rules the example
ballot above would result in Wiley and Garcia splitting the vote when Stringer is eliminated, with half
a vote counted towards each of their totals. If Wiley is subsequently eliminated before Garcia, the
half-vote carried by Wiley is transferred to Garcia, and vice-versa. The holding pen idea disincentivizes
purposefully overvoting, however, which may be desirable. The disincentive lies in the delay that it
takes for the overvote to be transferred in the event two or more continuing candidates are listed in
the overvote ranking. The power to decide how to break the tie in the overvote is granted to the voters
who correctly filled out their ballots, and the overvoter must wait for the reallocation of their ballots
to eliminate all but one of the overvoter’s simultaneous selections.
A perhaps more convincing example of an overvote ballot that merits inclusion is one of the form,

1. Blank, 2. {W iley, Garcia}

It is reasonable to think the voter meant to rank Wiley or Garcia first, and the other second, but filled
a bubble in the wrong column. Whether modifications to reallocation should be made to incorporate
information from the bottom portions of overvote ballots ultimately boils down to a question of what
class of voter preferences we want to be reflected in the outcome of the election. It may be that we
should only take a sequential ordering of a voter’s top candidates as a valid and unambiguous view
when electing an office-holder, in which case all genuine overvote ballots should be chopped as usual
and there is no holding area. If instead we want the outcome to reflect preference lists containing ties
(provided they don’t exceed the maximum number of allowed preferences), genuine overvotes would
receive a treatment like the holding area, or some other rational alternative. Our intention here is not
to advocate for one or another position, but rather to suggest the subject is worth exploring.

3.2 Alternative Treatment In Pairwise Comparisons

Finally, we give the results for the pairwise comparisons computed using the second approach to
overvotes that was mentioned briefly in the beginning of subsection 2.1, and illustrate the negligibility
of the effect it has on the division of preferences between the two candidates in each head-to-head. The

12
number of ballots taken into consideration by this second approach is 947,932. It is larger than the
number of ballots that were active at the start of RCV in the vote of June 22nd (which was 942,031)
because this approach takes into consideration the 5,901 overvote ballots that were inactived from
the get-go on the grounds of overvoting (before the first round of the RCV). These additional ballots
belong to individuals who either overvoted in their rank 1 position (5,751 voters), or had all blank
entries above their first overvote (150 voters).
The second approach takes into consideration all 10,330 overvote ballots and does not chop them,
but as mentioned in subsection 2.1 it makes an assumption: that the unknown candidates underlying
overvote(s) on a ballot were distinct from any named candidates also appearing below the overvote on
the same ballot. Note that the candidates’ preference counts using the RCV treatment for overvote
ballots (the first approach mentioned in section 2.1, which gives the counts in table 1 and figure 1) is
by construction a lower bound on what the counts could be upon the inclusion of preferences expressed
on ballots inactivated due to overvoting.
To illustrate the convention used for this second approach, consider the ballot,
1. Adams, 2. overvote, 3. W iley
We would count this towards Adams’s preferences over Wiley, as well as towards his preferences over
every other candidate in a head-to-head, but we would not count the ballot toward Wiley’s preferences
over any other candidate. This is because the voter could have ranked Garcia, Yang, Stringer, etc in
the rank 2 position. So far it counts just like it would in the chopped treatment. The difference is that
we would not interpret this ballot as necessarily indicating the voter had no preference in all pairs
that exclude Adams. Rather we deem such cases as “indeterminate” in the pairwise comparisons. On
the other hand, we would interpret the ballot:
1. overvote, 2. W iley, 3. Adams
as meaning the voter preferred Wiley over Adams, but would count the ballot as indeterminate in any
other head-to-head.
The resulting counts are given in figure 4. The same conventions that were used in figure 1
apply, with the addition that indeterminate cases are shown in dark gray. The results are repeated in
table format for convenience (table 6). The same conventions that were used in table 1 apply, with
indeterminate cases given as the fourth and final entry in each cell. (The “indeterminate” designation
only exists for this second way of handling/modeling overvotes in pairwise comparisons.)

Pairwise Comparisons: Vote Totals Using Projection For Overvotes

vs. Garcia vs. Wiley vs. Yang vs. Stringer
Adams (404591, 397431, 138727, 7183) (434988, 357485, 148154, 7305) (447814, 249412, 243355, 7351) (474264, 238904, 227309, 7455)
Garcia — (356474, 364905, 218517, 8036) (428069, 262603, 249062, 8198) (453253, 204274, 282072, 8333)
Wiley — (436523, 295336, 208008, 8065) (436342, 217070, 286303, 8217)
Yang — (340936, 285918, 312654, 8424)

Table 6: Head-to-head preference counts computed using second approach for overvotes. Each triplet
consists of (left to right): 1. preferences for the row candidate over the column candidate, 2. preferences
for the column candidate over the row candidate, 3. those who expressed no preference, and 4. cases
where a preference cannot be determined given the assumption (a subset of overvotes).

The differences between the 10 pairwise comparisons resulting from the two ways of handling over-
votes are shown in table 7 (counts without chopping minus counts with chopping). The projection

13
 Pairwise Comparisons
∗with exhausted overvotes projection∗

Figure 4: Pairwise comparisons for top 5 candidates. Each pie chart shows the fraction that preferred A
over B in the color associated with candidate A, and vice-versa for the those who preferred candidate
B over A. Voters who did not express a preference are shown in light gray, and the asterisked
remainder in dark gray shows indeterminate cases (a subset of overvote ballots). Raw vote totals
given in parentheses, and their corresponding percentages outside each slice.
14
negligibly impacts the candidates’ preference counts (it results in gains of fewer than 150 votes for
each candidate, relative to hundreds of thousands). The main effect of not chopping overvote ballots
and making the assumption mentioned is that some 7000-8500 preference are deemed indeterminate.
This is partly due to the inclusion of the additional 5,901 ballots of individuals who overvoted in
their top rank after blank entries are excluded, but not entirely. Some of the overvote ballots which
when chopped are judged as having expressed no preference between two candidates because neither
is ranked above the overvote become recognized as uncertain when the entire ballot is considered, as
the number of indeterminate calls — fourth entry in each cell of table 7 — exceeds 5,901 in every
head-to-head.
Pairwise Comparisons: Difference Between The Two Ways Of Handling Overvotes
vs. Garcia vs. Wiley vs. Yang vs. Stringer
Adams (78, 115, −1475, 7183) (83, 82, −1569, 7305) (148, 74, −1672, 7351) (109, 82, −1745, 7455)
Garcia — (96, 114, −2345, 8036) (144, 131, −2572, 8198) (138, 80, −2650, 8333)
Wiley — (126, 105, −2395, 8065) (127, 95, −2538, 8217)
Yang — (128, 111, −2762, 8424)

Table 7: Differences in the head-to-head preference counts for the two treatments of overvotes (counts
using non-chopped overvote treatment minus counts using chopped treatment). Each cell contains
(left to right): 1. difference in the preferences for the row candidate over the column candidate, 2.
difference in the preferences for the column candidate over the row candidate, 3. difference in the no
preference counts, and 4. cases deemed indeterminate by the non-chopped approach.

Kate Eckerle is the head of Data Science at Slingshot Strategies

and holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Columbia University.

*The Yang Campaign was one of Slingshot Strategies’ clients during the NYC mayoral Primary race.

15