SDGOP Follows Democrats in Moving Convention Online

South Dakota Republicans are showing a little good sense on coronavirus. Following the lead of South Dakota Democrats, the SDGOP is moving its June convention online. Instead of infesting Watertown on June 20, our Republican neighbors will huddle around their screens across the state and cast their votes with technology from Voatz, a company that provided voting via smartphone for the 2016 Massachusetts Democratic convention, the 2018 West Virginia midterm election, and the 2016 Utah Republican convention. Voatz has handled voting at this year’s GOP and Dem conventions in Utah and the GOP convention in Arizona. Utah Republicans seem  pleased with the results:

Derek Brown, chairman of the state party, gushed that the participation rate was higher than an in-person convention two years ago, that the ranked-choice option from Voatz streamlined the process of winnowing down candidates and that users were pretty unanimous in their praise. Security experts told POLITICO they were less worried about using Voatz or other forms of online voting at party conventions than in traditional elections, but questioned the wisdom of the experiment. One said the nature of the convention could pose additional risks, too [Tim Starks, “States Dabble with Online Voting,” Politico, 2020.04.30].

So Republicans who tell us counterevidentially that mail-in voting is ripe for fraud will trust a smartphone voting system that MIT says has some security flaws, and Republicans who brand ranked-choice voting as “Berkeley balloting” will adopt that very system for their own conventions? Boy, we can’t look to Republicans for consistent messaging on anything, can we?

Thanks to coronavirus, Voatz is getting the chance to show skeptics how useful and fair ranked-choice voting can be in choosing candidates from large fields:

A peculiar new turn of phrase has crept into the campaign vocabularies of Utah political candidates.

“If I’m not your first choice,” they say in online pitches to the Democratic and Republican delegates who will participate in state nominating conventions concluding April 25, “then let me be your second choice.”

…The reason that candidates are begging to be delegates’ first or second choices is that Voatz uses a ranked-choice voting scheme.

While using the Voatz application, the GOP and Democratic delegates to their state conventions will rank all candidates for each office in their order of preference.

For example, there are a dozen GOP candidates in the running to replace outgoing U.S. Representative Rob Bishop in Congress. Delegates will rank all 12 of those candidates from favorite to least favorite on their electronic ballot.

Voatz’ proprietary software then eliminates the lowest-ranking candidates and reallocates the votes of their supporters to second choices. That shuffling process continues until two final candidates emerge [Charlie Schill, “Online Voting Will Dominate State Political Conventions,” Cache Valley Daily, 2020.04.23].

Voatz will also need to work into its algorithms the formula prescribed by state law to weight convention votes by each county’s 2018 gubernatorial vote. I wonder if anyone dialing in to the convention will make a point of order and ask for the chair to distribute a spreadsheet showing the actual tally of each vote so each delegate can check the results.

The SDGOP will allow delegates to assemble at its Sioux Falls HQ and a Rapid City site, but I would assume that even those in-person participants will have to vote by the same smartphone app as delegates phoning in from the prairies and buttes.

Related Reading: Minnesota Republicans convened online weekend before last but had to postpone action due to voting software problems. Minnesota Democrats are holding their virtual convention this weekend, complete with a Skype/Zoom/whatever-in by the next President of the United States, Joe Biden.