🎙️The Simple Fix for RCV’s Big Waiting Game

One of the most common arguments against ranked choice voting is that it takes too long to get results — but what if that delay wasn't actually inevitable?

Expand Democracy Fellow Nivea Krishnan sits down with Brian Strege, Chairman of ANC 6/8F in DC’s Navy Yard neighborhood, to talk about a fix for one of ranked choice voting’s most common complaints: the wait. Brian played a key role in bringing RCV and semi-open primaries to Washington, DC, through the Initiative 83 campaign, and now chairs Grow Democracy DC, the group that fought to get the initiative funded and moving toward full implementation. By day, he’s a software engineer — a background that’s shaping his latest project, a “permutation-based” approach to reporting RCV results that he’s termed “Structured Ordering of RCV Ballots.{ Check out the website he’s created on the SORB idea.

DC just held its first-ever ranked choice voting election a couple of months ago, and Nivea and Brian start there: what the Board of Elections got right, where they fell short, and why voters had to wait five days after certification just to see the round-by-round count. From there, they dig into the bigger question behind that delay — why RCV results take as long as they do, and why that gap in information leaves media and voters alike in the dark on election night instead of getting the real-time context they’re used to with other races.

That’s the gap Brian’s permutation-based reporting is designed to close. Rather than waiting on a full round-by-round tabulation to report results, the approach allows precincts to release preliminary counts as they come in, making RCV reporting feel more normal. Nivea and Brian talk through how it actually works, whether it could hold up to outside scrutiny from media or independent groups looking to verify results themselves, and how big a lift it would be for jurisdictions already running RCV elections to adopt it.

They also get into something harder to quantify: trust. RCV is still new enough in most places that it can feel unfamiliar or even “alien” to voters used to picking just one candidate. Brian makes the case that faster, clearer reporting isn’t just a convenience — it’s part of what makes a new voting system feel legitimate and normal, rather than like a black box people have to take on faith.

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