2020 San Francisco RCV Election Not Reproducible

The good news is that San Francisco publishes full ballot data from their elections [1]. It's a quarter-gigabyte zip file full of JSON and I can go digging into it and look for deeper patterns in how people rank candidates on their ballot. Is there a hidden story about who 2nd-choice candidates were and what people really want? Did IRV screw up and we should switch to Condorcet?

The bad news is that I can't reproduce their results. They publish the full data, but the program they run isn't open source.

RCV Nearly Null Result

The Board of Elections of New York City released full vote data for the Ranked Choice Votes (RCV) for the 2021-06-22 primary election. I downloaded this data and processed it with my software to do some analysis. Out of 63 elections: 3 had different outcomes than pick-one (Yay! This way is better!) and none had different outcomes IRV vs Condorcet. I still maintain that IRV is inferior because sometimes it can fail and for no additional cost or complexity we can have something better, but that 'sometimes' is looking more rare in practice, though it did happen.