Tuesday’s D.C. primary was the first time ranked choice voting was used in the District. That means the final vote counts are going to take a while.
Workers at the D.C. Board of Elections continued to be busy counting the votes as of Wednesday afternoon.
Gary Thompson, chair of the D.C. Board of Elections, joined 海角社区app to give an update on where things stand right now when it comes to the counting of votes.
“We released a lot of data last night from all of the early votes, all of the mailed ballots that had been received before yesterday and all of the live votes yesterday. But we also received over 20,000 mailed ballots, mostly dropped off at our election centers, so our workers are processing those,” Thompson said.
He said they will release another set of results Wednesday evening.
When it comes to ranked voting, both the voting process and the counting of the votes has a different process.
He said so far, it’s working but everything’s just taking a little bit longer than in previous years.
“The implementation has been a big success. When you vote on screen, there’s a few more screens that you got to go through, so it took people voting live a little more time to stand in front of the screen than it did in prior years,” Thompson said. “That resulted in a little more wait time, especially in the late afternoon, right before the polls were closing, when a lot of people showed up.”
Thompson said that there didn’t seem to be much confusion or issues with the process other than the wait times and time to count the votes.
“Everybody seemed to understand it and now we just have to get all of those mail ballots open, processed and fed into the reader,” Thompson said. “It’s going to be pretty efficient once we get things in and we’ll be able to do the tabulations we need to do.”
Poll workers had counted the mail-in ballots and dropbox ballots that were received before Tuesday. But now, they’re focused on the ones that were just received Tuesday and Wednesday.
“We have a lot that were dropped off or received yesterday, a lot more received today through the U.S. Postal Service, so (we’re dealing with the ones) that are just coming in and there’s a lot of them that have to be processed and counted,” Thompson said.
He said getting that final vote count is the priority right now and that every day there will be “at least one update to the vote count.”
On Sunday, election workers will run the first ranked choice voting tabulation and “when we do that, if somebody’s past 50% then they’re (provisionally) the winner, pending our audits,” Thompson said.
But if that’s not the case, workers will use the ranked voice voting program, “where you drop the person in last place, redistribute those votes to their second-place choices, and then you see if you’ve got somebody past the 50-yard line. The program just keeps doing that until it calculates the ultimate outcome,” he said.
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
漏 2026 海角社区app. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
