[EM] Re: San Francisco IRV Ballots - District 9

[Greg Dennis]

just FYI on the San Francisco data . . .

a vote for candidate (number-of-candidates + 1) indicates an "overvote," 
which is a vote for more than one candidate at the same rank. in 
District 9 there were only 7 candidates, so a vote for candidate "08" 
indicates an overvote. SF counting rules dictate that you ignore the 
overvoted rank and all subsequent ranks.

a vote for candidate (number-of-candidates + 2) is an "undervote," a 
vote for no candidates at that rank. in District 9, a vote for candidate 
"09" was an undervote. in the case of an undervote, SF rules dictate 
that you promote all subsequent ranks. that is a vote for "blank 2 3" 
should be treated as if the voter selected "2 3 blank".

as for why the numbers don't add up, I'm not exactly sure. my best guess 
is that there were 118 ballots with unqualified write-ins that are not 
appearing in the summary Eric shows below. modifying your code to do a 
simple per-candidate breakdown should answer this.

Greg



Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 11:40:08 -0500
From: Eric Gorr <eric at ericgorr.net>
Subject: [EM] San Francisco IRV Ballots - District 9
To: election-methods at electorama.com
Message-ID: <42370FE8.1090307 at ericgorr.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

I am doing my own count of the votes and I seem to be having trouble
getting the same tally for district 9 that match the official results.

The data I am using comes from:

http://web.sfgov.org/site/election_index.asp?id=28171

The results can be found at:

http://www.sfgov.org/site/election_index.asp?id=20236

For district 9, there was a majority winner.

TOM AMMIANO.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .    12,547
RENEE SAUCEDO .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .     5,460
MIGUEL BUSTOS .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .     4,318
LUCRECIA BERMUDEZ.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .     1,018
STEVE ZELTZER .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .       798
JAMES BORIS PEREZ.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .       575
ADAM CABOT (QUALIFIED WRITE-IN) .  .  .        17

I am coming up with a total of 26275 total potential ballots. Once one
throws out the ballots which only contain a candidate 08 or 09 which
seem to correspond to a voter who did not vote in this race as there is
no candidate 08 or 09, I come up with a total of 24868 ballots to count.
However, in the official tally, they counted only 24750 ballots - a
difference of 118 ballots.

For anyone who has done their own tally, based on the most recent data,
what were your totals?