IN THE past year, students demanded serious elections reform at the University -- and they got it. While the University Board of Elections has certainly delivered dramatic improvements to election policy, drawing applause from involved students and interested observers alike, no one seems to have noticed that a modification that will completely change the nature of student elections has snuck in surreptitiously. And what's worse, it appears this imposing change was made without any input from the student body at large.
The change that no one is talking about is a simple addendum: To win, candidates must receive 50.1 percent of votes. In the past, the candidate with the most votes simply won, provided they beat the closest opposition by a 5 percent margin. The change is a fairly major one -- our voting system has gone from a standard democratic procedure to an system unheard of in the United States. It is unconscionable that such a switch was pulled behind students' backs. The University community should demand both explanation and rectification of such a blatant a perversion of student self-governance.
One reason so little has been made of the new policy is that it comes hand-in-hand with the advent of Instant Runoff Voting, a system complicated enough to dissuade many students from questioning any facet of its operation. Instant Runoff Voting allows voters to rank candidates, giving them a second choice, third choice and so on.
As noted above, a winning candidate previously had to garner a 5 percent margin of victory to be elected. If top candidates finished within that 5 percent margin of each other, a runoff election was held, as occurred last year between Daisy Lundy and Ed Hallen.
Instant Runoff Voting eliminates the need for runoff elections -- if no candidate wins by the set margin of victory, the system eliminates the candidate receiving the least number of votes and allocates the votes of students who voted for the last-place candidate to their second choice. If this reallocation provides a candidate with enough votes to meet the required margin, the race ends; if not, the system performs the same procedure again -- and again and again until a candidate has enough votes to win.
In this respect, the system effectively performs exactly the same service as a full-blown runoff, but does so instantly. Sounds great. And indeed, if applied to the same elections standards as were previously enforced, there would have been no change except time saved, as the runoff system would only be triggered if candidates finished within 5 percent of each other.
But somewhere along the line, someone decided that the University's definition of winning an election should be changed -- and it wasn't the student body.
Anyone who examined the results of the UBE's mock election last week noticed something strange. George W. Bush received more votes than any other candidate -- and lost. Bush, the "winning" candidate, collected 44.5 percent of the vote, while the remainder was fractured among the Democratic candidates. But because the new voting policy calls for 50.1 percent of voters to pick a candidate as one of their choices, six rounds of "runoff" were held, and in the end, John Kerry won the election despite the fact that only 22.6 percent of students voted for him as their first choice.
By requiring a winning candidate to achieve this 50.1 percent "approval" and holding runoff election rounds until such a candidate is found, the new system completely changes the nature of voting. In a democracy, we are used to having a vote and casting it. The new system instead tests voters' preferences and tries to find a candidate that most people can support in some capacity.
Whether this system is better than the traditional democratic scheme is entirely debatable. But one thing is clear -- the student body never approved it. No ballot measure was put before students. The UBE, which was ratified by popular election, did not choose the new policy either, according to UBE Chair Brian Cook.
Instead, the idea for this radical new voting scheme came from a working group of administrators and interested students that met last year in the wake of the presidential elections. Gavin Reddick, a member of the group, confirmed that while brainstorming potential reforms, the idea was suggested and approved. Subsequently, ITC was asked to draft software accommodating the idea and by the time the UBE was formed, the framework for the new system was in place. The switch was never questioned.
Most students and administrators seem to think the shift in policy is for the best. However, organizers' partiality for the system has allowed them to forget that some students, perhaps even a majority, might not agree.
Instead of submitting plans to completely change student elections to the community for open debate and majority ratification, a small group of individuals has decided what is best for the student body and silently made their whims a reality. This is unacceptable. Students need to stand up and say something about this unapproved radical shift immediately before a system they barely understand changes elections forever.
Nick Chapin is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer.
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