How to Tabulate RCV results with a Cast Vote Record

In order to understand how to calculate the final round/Hypothetical results, we first need to understand the basics of RCV. Trust me, this was important to figuring it out, and is important in order to make sure that all bugs can be sorted out. 

Basically, RCV gives you a certain amount of options where you a rank a preference between your favorite or least favorite. Example rank: 1) Sheila Nezhad, 2) Kate Knuth 3) Jacob Frey.

To understand how RCV votes count, you need to know that ALL votes for a candidate* count towards them no matter how early or late the prior candidates votes exhausted. 

for NYC 2021, say I voted for Wiley, Stringer, Adams, Garcia, and Adams again, that vote would count for Adams in the final round, once Wiley was eliminated despite Scott Stringer being eliminated much earlier. 

Note that the vote doesn't count for Garcia, or Adams twice. This will be important later. 

The Cast vote record is exactly as it sounds, a record of all the individual ballots cast in any given election. Ipso facto what this does is give you how *every voter* individually ranked their ballot, from this you will need to use a countif function to get the round 1 results, and a more complicated Countifs function, deliniated with a table, to get the final round results—once you understand all the excentricities in Ranking ballots.

Mouthfull title, I know. Anyway. Due to the above mentioned nature, there are many potential eccentricities that need to be accounted for. While Ballot Exhaust is the one that's most well known—because it's the one candidates hate the most—for calculating results the worst ones are what I like to call Multi-voting and Double voting. 

Oh and for NYC, make sure you calculate all the vote totals together per Borough individually (Vote types together, Boroughs by themselves), if you don't that will Royally screw you up on the easy step of counting the votes on the First Round.

CVRs are very sensitive to these sorts of thing.