She clicks a button.

The following institutions have asked to be informed when your physical mailing address changes. Select all those who you wish to notify. Note that packages and letters will still be sent to your new address no matter your selection.

[ ] Largest River City Government (Resident tracking)

[ ] Forest-Mountain Confluence City Government (Resident tracking)

[ ] SSC Bank of Flowers (Fraud prevention)

[ ] Global Weather Alert Service (Topical alerts)

[ ] Children's Rights Promotion Coordination (Topical alerts)

[ ] Select All

She selects everything except the children's rights group — she doesn't go to local advocacy meetups anyway, she prefers to just participate online — and then goes to finish packing.

The Largest River City Government mainframe receives a notification from the postal service. The authentication code checks out, so it checks the physical address against its local database of addresses, checks the personal identifier against its list of banned people, and handshakes with the Forest-Mountain Confluence City Government mainframe to make sure they saw the same update.

When everything has been confirmed, it sends an email and dispatches a print job to one of the printers colocated with the Largest River City Post Office. The printer prints off a copy of the form "Welcome to Largest River City" letter on some nice cardstock, slaps the address on the other side, and drops it into a chute, where it slides down to the automatic sorter along with all the other local mail deliveries.

The automatic sorter spits it out into a mail delivery bag, and the evening postal delivery takes it to Míshtet's new apartment building, where it will wait for her to arrive.

Moving is hectic, and so the welcome letter actually ends up on the dining table under a box for about a month before Míshtet finally notices it. Luckily, it's not exactly anything time sensitive — a welcome to the city, along with references to local resources and a quick reference guide to uncommon local laws, which she's pretty much already picked up by osmosis.

She gets settled into her new job, and doesn't need to interact with the city government again for about a year.

A timer ticks over — and the official voting period has begun. The mainframe signals for a human's confirmation, because it doesn't start jobs this big without a confirmation that nothing has gone seriously wrong.

The city clerk assigned to election-related issues clicks the big button in their task queue.

The mainframe checkpoints the database, ensures it's replicated to a backup, calculates the hash, and publishes the hash to the city infrastructure's transparency log. In case of any irregularities during the vote, investigators will be able to know exactly what state the mainframe was in.

It prints a test ballot, for the candidates to certify — one copy for the clerk, and then 24 copies mailed to the candidates who are competing for seats on the council or elected executive positions.

And then it waits.

The candidates are on top of things, and it receives confirmation from all of them within the 10-day period mandated by law. With the form of the ballot confirmed, it starts generating print jobs. 13,0102,1335 of them — one for every person residing in the city. This number is shared on the transparency log as well.

The printers at the post office all start spitting out ballots at a sustainable pace. Two maintenance technicians are standing by to make sure that nothing goes wrong. Occasionally, they load another batch of ballot paper into the special tray, both recording it and signing off on it in their own logs.

The printed ballots are automatically folded and put into privacy envelopes before being dropped into the chute. They're also marked for tracked delivery.

So when they pass through the automatic sorting machine, the machine sends a ping back to the city's mainframe, logging which ballot was seen when, headed where.

In any city as large as Largest River City, some people are always on the move. And so a relatively small number of ballots — about 0.001 of them — end up routed to addresses outside the city. This is fine; the laws of Largest River City explicitly take into account people moving around election time, and they are expected to either cast one final vote, or just to send their ballot back spoiled.

Míshtet's letter ends up routed into the same mailbag that brought her the welcome notice when she first moved here. Printing that many ballots takes a long time, so they don't all end up being delivered in the same trip. Míshtet's letter is delivered with the morning delivery of a day that she has an early shift.

She glances at it, remembers that she meant to research the candidates, and consigns it to the table while she rushes to work.

When she gets back, she's tired enough that she doesn't want to deal with it. But by the next morning, her sense of civic responsibility has convinced her to break open the envelope and read the ballot.

This is an official ballot for the Largest River City election of 4,1054. This ballot's randomized unique ID is 6b059c88-966f-4735-af21-35e975198e73. This ID is not linked to your name or location, but can be used to verify that the ballot was counted after the election by checking that the ID is present in nref:largest-river.city/elections/ballot-verification/41054:latest.

Largest River City uses a randomized Condorcet method. See this reference for more information: nref:largest-river.city/elections/rules:41054-14-10

If your ballot has not been mailed by 41054-15-10, it will not be counted.

Official statements from the candidates can be read here: nref:largest-river.city/elections/candidate-information:41054-14-10

Instructions: For each office, please rank your choice of candidates, with 1 being the candidate you would most like to see in office. You are not permitted to give the same rank to two candidates. If you are truly indifferent between two or more candidates, please roll a die or use some other true randomization method. You are required to rank every candidate.

These requirements are necessary as part of our election system to minimize tactical voting.

When you have completed your ballot, fold it and place it into the included return envelope, and put it in the mail. If you have questions or concerns about your ballot, such as issues with misprints, missing envelopes, or other irregularities, contact the city election office at cm:largest-river.city/elections by mail, phone, or email.

A note on tactical voting: While it is technically possible to engage in tactical voting, in practice the system renders tactical voting mostly pointless. The only way to vote tactically is to try to arrange for marginal candidates not to end up in the Condorcet set, but real-world surveys of voters suggest that this is not usually possible, since the vast majority of voters vote honestly. Refer to the analysis at nref:largest-river.city/elections/voting-survey:41054-14-10 for more information.

Ballot:

...

... that's a lot more complicated than she was expecting. Forest-Mountain Confluence City just used approval voting, which worked fine.

She feels vaguely suspicious of the city's ballot design. Things should only be as complicated as they need to be.

She checks who her children's rights group endorses — a handful of candidates, but not one for every office — and then looks up candidates personal statements and media profiles until her dinner is delivered. She makes notes on scratch paper about who she would prefer to whom, and feels vaguely annoyed that this is so much more work than her old city's system. She drops a citizen complaint into the city's email inbox.

After dinner, she does not fill out her ballot, because she doesn't do important things tired, and goes to sleep.

The next day, she wakes up and fills in her choices, before folding the ballot and putting it in the envelope.

She takes it with her as she walks down to get breakfast, and drops it in the outgoing mail slot.

The return envelope is marked for tracked delivery as well — but not with the same tracking ID, because citizens have a right to a secret vote, and that would let ballots be matched to persons. So when it passes through the mail sorter, the mainframe just adds it to an ongoing tally, so that it can check that fewer ballots were received than were sent. (There are always some that don't get returned, but usually not too many).

Then the sorter drops it into a lockbox, where it waits until 41054-15-12.

The mainframe has counted 10,5343,2245 returned ballots by the time all the mail for the allowed window has been sorted. This is not a bad return, actually. It publishes this number to the transparency log, and notifies the election workers that counting may begin.

Two election workers come to carry the lockboxes full of ballots to the several event halls around the city that the government has rented for the counting. They're trailed by a small mob of observers for different candidates, who are allowed to look but not touch.

Once the boxes are inside the counting halls, volunteers and members of Emergency Services lock the doors and verify that they are locked.

Now, the first step begins: opening all the envelopes and counting how many ballots are actually present in the room.

Volunteers open envelopes and count ballots into piles of 100. These piles are then double-checked by another volunteer, before being clipped together with two alligator clips and being added to the central tables, which are slowly being covered in neat stacks of paper. Hand-held scanners log the ballots' unique IDs for later publication. The IDs are also checked against the list of ballots issued, to make sure that nobody tried to sneak in counterfeit ballots.

The observers roam the hall, spot-checking volunteers work. Eventually, all 10,5343,2245 ballots are accounted for, across the different counting rooms.

Then the next, vital step of the process takes place: everybody breaks to have a snack. It's a bit early for a full lunch, but nobody wants election volunteers to make a mistake, so there is plenty of food, and breaks scheduled throughout the day.

The food is catered by a few local businesses, so there are plenty of options. Mostly, people go with wraps, since they're easy to eat while standing around and chatting.

Once everyone is ready, the process starts back up again. The ballots are fed through a human assembly line of different stations. The diagram showing their movement is printed on a big banner and hung on one wall. The hall has a perfectly good projector, which could show the diagram just fine, but a lot less can go wrong with a banner.

First, the ballots are checked, and spoiled ballots are removed, set aside, and counted separately. From then on, each of the non-spoiled ballots makes its way around the room in a slow snake. There are 23 candidates — one dropped out — but they are not, luckily, all vying for the same position. 12 of them are angling for the 3 open council seats, and the remaining 11 are competing for 3 different positions.

Each possible head-to-head race for each position is considered, and counted twice by separate stations. This means that there are 430 separate counting stations counting different aspects of the ballots. Each one is staffed with a number of volunteers, who rotate in and out to take their breaks or to reinforce any part of the line where there is a pile up. They sign into and out of the stations, so that there's a record of who was where at what time.

This is the tedious part. Even with 213,0000 volunteers working across the city (about one in every 400 people is volunteering in some way), counting 10,5343,2245 ballots takes a long time.

Many hours later, people are starting to be tired, but finally every vote has been counted. The numbers of each counting station are cross-checked. There are minor discrepancies, but these are sorted out by going with the result that matches the expected total. They are still noted down, and will get published in the post-election retrospective.

Once the counting is done, the ballots are once more consigned to a table guarded by some Emergency Services personnel, and the less enthusiastic volunteers head home. Everyone else waits.

Every counting hall writes down their totals, makes a copy, and certifies both. Volunteers take them to city hall, holding the counts clearly in their hands, trailed by some observers. The totals are also phoned in.

City hall checks the copies against each other and the totals that were phoned in, and then puts together a final count of every ballot.

The non-council positions all have a clear winner, who is elected. The council election is not so clear-cut — the Condorcet set contains 4 candidates, for the 3 open positions.

The city clerk invites each of the 4 candidates to pick a random number between 0 and 10,5343,2245. They each pull out some 100-sided dice, and generate a number. The city clerk adds them up by hand, and takes the result modulo 10,5343,2245. Some observers double-check his work with calculators.

Ballot 10,3545,0544 is selected. The city clerk reads through the totals from each hall in order, and determines which hall contains the ballot. The candidates and observers take a trip through the city. In the other counting halls, the ballots are loaded back into their lockboxes, sealed, and sent to the city's storage in case of a re-count.

In the counting hall, stacks of 10,000 ballots are shifted from one table to the next, until the right stack is found. A volunteer counts down to the right bundle, opens it, and counts to the right ballot while everybody watches with baited breath.

Finally, ballot 10,3545,0544 is found.

Neither of Míshtet's top two choices made it into the final set — but she did still have opinions about the others. She ranked Vordúþa dead last, because she doesn't like their policy proposals for reducing restrictions on large ships transiting the river, or for withdrawing from the city's subsidized moving costs agreement.

Vordúþa bows to the assembled, and officially concedes the election to their worthy opponents.

The last ballots are packed away, and results are posted. Many people will read them in the morning.

And life in Largest River City continues on.