Either one would likely launch in August 2025.

Proponents of approval voting claim it is much faster to implement than ranked choice voting. For example, Seattle Approves, which sponsored the approval voting (AV) measure on the November ballot in the city, writes: "In Seattle, Approval Voting could be adopted in November 2022 and potentially could be used in the 2023 primary election. RCV [ranked choice voting] would have a difficult and long road to adoption because it would require changes to the law and voting software.”

Is this true? Not really.

In Seattle, any new voting system adopted in November 2022, whether AV or RCV, will almost certainly not be ready for the city’s August 2023 primary election nine months later.

The real question is whether it will be ready within two years and nine months, for the August 2025 primary election, or within four years and nine months, for the August 2027 primary. The balance of evidence suggests that either system would launch in August 2025.

AV: Simpler but not faster

AV proponents are not wrong: AV is simpler to administer than RCV, which should make it faster to launch. It requires smaller changes to ballots than RCV. Julie Wise, elections director for King County, which encompasses Seattle, told Sightline, “Approval voting would be pretty familiar to our voters---the instructions would change but the overall ballot wouldn’t need to change.” Likewise, AV would require much smaller changes to ballot counting software than RCV.

But that simplicity would not advance the launch date to August 2023 from August 2025, which is the deadline written into the ballot measure for AV. It’d be faster, but not fast enough to matter.

Under state and local law and policy, all new and upgraded voting systems (including ballot designs combined with vote-counting hardware and software) require 1) certification in one of a handful of federally accredited testing laboratories, 2) testing by the state, 3) authorization by the secretary of state in Olympia, and 4) a final set of tests and audits at the local level. Completing these steps in nine months would be next to impossible.

King County uses ballot counting software from a company called Clear Ballot, and Clear Ballot does not have software systems ready and certified for RCV or AV. Seattle Approves leader Troy Davis told Sightline that King County is already authorized to use its existing Clear Ballot systems to tabulate approval votes, but Elections Director Wise disagrees. She says it’s unclear what certification and authorization AV would need.

One key line of state law, for example, says that any change in any voting system that “extend(s) its function” requires reapproval by the secretary of state. A wholesale change to approval voting sure seems like it “extends the function” of Clear Ballot’s system. Clear Ballot would therefore probably need to run the full gauntlet of certification and authorization before tallying AV votes. That process alone might take a year, as noted below. The final word in how to interpret state law, of course, is neither Julie Wise’s, nor Troy Davis’s, nor mine. It would have to come from the secretary of state or the courts, but even getting an answer would take time, slowing implementation.

King County is meticulous (and unhurried) in its election administration

Even without a full certification gauntlet, though, AV is unlikely to be ready by August 2023. Julie Wise and the staff of King County Elections treat ballot design and voter education with admirable seriousness. Seattle has twice as many voters as St. Louis and six times as many as Fargo, other places that have implemented AV. King County Elections is a national leader in election administration, and it tests, tests, and tests again its innovations before launching them: user testing, focus groups, real-world simulations, and more. Asked when she thought she could launch AV or RCV, Julie Wise demurred, citing the many unknowns. Then she told Sightline:

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