Well, another SG election has come and gone. But boy, was this one exciting. AU has never before seen an SG election where the winner won by only 30 votes, or where they defied the endorsements of both the sitting president and the campus newspaper, or where an aspiring British monarch ran and garnered one-fifth of the vote.
Emily Yu is clearly going to make a great SG president. But some students have raised concerns over electing a candidate with only 28 percent of the vote, particularly in such a close race. Their concerns are not without merit.
The SG uses a plurality system for its elections, wherein the candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of whether they receive an absolute majority of votes. A plurality system is by far the most vulnerable to the spoiler effect, where a minor candidate with little chance of winning can affect the results of a really close election.
Though it’s impossible to know how students “would have” voted, it’s very likely that Charles Merrick’s candidacy served as the spoiler for this election, and may well have affected the final outcome.
Concerned students may be interested to learn that in the Student Confederation (which preceded the SG until 2005) a candidate had to receive at least 40 percent of the vote to be declared the winner, or else a runoff election would be held. The last time this happened was in 2004, when two candidates — one with 35.8 percent of the vote, another with 24.1 percent of the vote — went on to a runoff election, leaving three other candidates behind. The winner of the runoff election took a much more definitive 55.7 percent of the vote.
This runoff provision did not carry over when the Student Government replaced the Student Confederation. Yet under the SG, the last time that an elected president received greater than 40 percent of the vote was in 2009.
The SG needs a more definitive electoral process to grant its winners the unquestioned legitimacy that they deserve. But runoff elections are a lot of extra work for the already stressed candidates and BOE members to endure. That’s why I support the adoption of instant runoff voting for SG elections.
Instant runoff voting is based on the idea of voters ranking all of the candidates from first-choice to last-choice, with their first-choice obviously being the individual they want to vote for. But when all of the first-choice votes are tabulated, if no candidate wins an outright majority, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated from the election, and everyone who voted for that candidate has their second-choice vote counted. And this process of eliminating the next-least popular candidate continues until one candidate emerges with an absolute majority of over 50 percent of the vote.
Instant runoff voting works because it ensures that the winner is the individual more-highly preferred by a majority of students over all of the other choices on the ballot, without having to extend the campaign season to include a full-fledged runoff election.
There are many elements of SG elections that need to be fixed; no one idea is going to make the entire system more fair and open. But departing from a plurality system to an instant runoff system will ensure that the results of the election are far more reflective of the will of the student body. It will virtually eliminate the impact of spoiler candidates on the final outcome, and it will give the eventual winner an indisputable level of legitimacy that they deserve to receive so that they can truly have the standing to represent all students.
Douglas Bell is a junior in the School of Communication.
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