Day 10 - Tied Votes and Recounts in TallyJ

Once all the ballots have been entered, the process of analyzing the results begins.

In the most straight-forward scenario, the results show clearly who has been elected, and there are no close votes or tied votes.

However, in many (most?) elections, it is not that simple. Here is an example to:

Analysis

This first example shows that there are no tied votes. However, you can see that there are only two votes different between Elizabeth and Helen, in the 9th and 10th positions. When it is this close, then a review is needed, and tellers would be wise to recount the ballots. (By the way, If you look at that screen carefully, you will realize that this "election" could not be real, since 16 voters cast 28 ballots! You are right... this is a fictitious sample!)

Recounting Ballots

If the votes are close or if there is a tie, then tellers should "recount" the ballots, to ensure that there were no mistakes in entering them into TallyJ. For this purpose, TallyJ has a report available to shows all the ballots:

On this report, you can see that ballots A4, A11 and A12 are all rejected as spoiled. And you can also see spoiled votes on ballots A6 and A13.

To do the recount, tellers compare what they see in this report with each of the paper ballots. If any mistakes are found, then the affected ballot is corrected in TallyJ.

There is, of course, no objection to doing a recount/validation of all the ballots even if there is no tie or close votes - especially if any tellers had difficulty in processing ballots.

Once all the ballots have been checked, and any corrections made, the "recount" is complete.

Tie Votes

Analysis - Ties

In this second (also very fictitious) example for an election at a unit convention, you can see that there are some ties. Assuming that we have already done a recount (see above), we still don't know who the 5th delegate is, and we do not know the order of those receiving the next highest number of votes. In this case, we need to have two independent tie-break votes! The tie marked "Tie A" is okay, as this does not affect the results of the election. And, of course, "Tie D" also has no bearing on the result of the election.

For each of the ties B and C, a separate tie-break election is held as usual. In this example, both are just for one person from two possible people, so tallying the votes is quite simple, and can be done without relying on TallyJ by sorting the vote papers into piles for each person, and counting how many votes each person received. (If a tie break is between 3 or more people, tellers may want to use a new election in TallyJ to tally those ballots!)

Once the results are known for each tie-break election, the number of votes received is entered in the places shown:

And then the final results can be reported, showing the tie-break votes as well:

Tellers Report

(I hope the participation rate in your elections is better than for this fictitious community! Only 3% voted!)

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