Counting votes in precincts (or counties), then sending the precinct totals to the statewide election office – it has been a way of life in almost all US states for as long as any of us have lived.
But if we were to switch to IRV (instant runoff) voting, that would no longer be possible. All the votes, en masse, would have to be given to statewide central tabulating for them to count; there simply could no longer be such a thing as a "county subtotal."
Is that an insuperable obstacle to adopting IRV voting? No. It'd be a huge change in US election procedures, financing, and organization, and it might make everything much more easily vulnerable to huge centrally-organized election frauds – you won't be able to observe your and your neighbors' own votes being counted anymore – but it won't be fatal to IRV, since central counting is certainly possible.
To make it clearer why there is no such thing as a district "subtotal" anymore if we use IRV voting, consider the following example.
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In district I, IRV eliminates C, then B wins 7:6. In district II (same as district I but the roles of A and C are reversed), B also wins 7:6. But in the combined 2-district country, B has 8 top-rank votes, A and C have 9 each, so B is eliminated and either A or C wins. Thus merging two districts both won by Bush under IRV, can produce an IRV victory for Gore.
IRV can be done on plurality machines, and counted in precincts, by simply making each permutation (rank ordering) be a "candidate."
Our response: That's true but practically infeasible. In a C-candidate race, each voting machine would have to have C! pseudo-candidates and each precinct would have to pass C! "subtotal" counts on to the central tabulator. If C is large this is infeasible:
| C | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C! | 6 | 24 | 120 | 720 | 5040 | 40320 | 362880 | 3628800 | 39916800 | 479001600 | 6227020800 | 87178291200 | 1307674368000 |
Note, 13! is about equal to the present world population. Heck, you could just pass all the V votes to the central tabulator, and that'd be easier than passing the subtotals (if C!>V) which defeats the purpose of having subtotals. (A typical precinct has V=2000 voters. But 7! = 5040. Also if the IRV rules allow "ballot truncation" then the true number of ballot types actually would be much larger than C!.)
So "counting in precincts" is silly if precincts have to pass an exponentially large amount of information along – larger than just not totalling at all and just sending all the votes in unprocessed form!
Also, more to the point, I want to have precinct totals be published. That's not going to happen if a precinct is going to have to publish 6!=720 "totals" in one race. And even if that did happen, then this publishing would defeat ballot secrecy and open the door to vote-selling and coercion.
Actually IRV can be counted in precincts if there is two-way communication between precincts and headquarters – headquarters informs all precincts who to eliminate next, then precincts report their top-rank totals (among remaining candidates) and then the cycle repeats. But that could require all precinct workers to keep counting and recounting until every single last vote everywhere gets counted, which'd be a very long workday (or perhaps a better word than "day" is "month"...). The way many IRV countries actually do it is, they do a single pass making a probabilistic model of who is likely to be eliminated and in what order. If the model turns out to be correct, then everything goes smoothly. If it turns out to be wrong, then they get into trouble and have to start recalling the election workers and doing more counts... If it gets it wrong in more than one way we can really get into huge difficulties... but fortunately this in practice seems rare, probably because all IRV countries so far have been 2-party dominated. In Australia's 24 November 2007 elections, the Election Commission was unable to determine the composition of parliament until over 1 month later because of numerous races which were difficult for them to count.
Analogous problem for Condorcet voting systems