This year's Undergraduate Council of Students leadership has made election reform a top issue, and with good reason. After the confusion of last year's election, it's clear that there is much to discuss - and that reform must not wait.
While student elections are never perfect, one simple change would do much to clarify the current system, and move past one of its fundamental problems. UCS should implement instant runoff voting as soon as possible.
I admit that I am not writing strictly from an outsider's perspective - last year I was one of four candidates running for UCS president. That election was similar in most respects to recent ones. UCS chairmanships went uncontested, and every position, save one, featured at most two candidates.
As in previous years, there were more than two candidates for UCS president. And, as in the last four election cycles, no presidential candidate won a simple majority.
The UCS Constitution mandates that if a situation occurs in which no candidate receives a simple majority, "a runoff election will be held between those two candidates having the largest plurality for a position." Here's where we got into trouble.
The Council had established a procedure to avoid runoffs, and it had been successful in 2001, 2002 and 2003. After the votes are in, the candidates are taken into a room and told the results of the election, without names. They are then asked if they accept the results. Every candidate must agree to accept the results to avoid a runoff, and last year, for the first time in an undergraduate lifespan, they did not.
Who wanted to accept what is both private and irrelevant. But there are two salient points here. First: the larger the group of candidates, the less likely they are to accept the results. Second, and much more important: extra-constitutional procedures which avoid runoffs will ultimately result in confusion and potential danger once someone decides to follow the constitution.
Those dangers are exacerbated by the nature of student elections. Undergraduates are notoriously poor vessels for "institutional memory," and a system which leaves a runoff election in the balance until days before reading period eliminates even a basic preservation of procedure. While turnout for student elections at Brown is comparatively high, runoff turnout is almost guaranteed to be lower.
Last spring, the gap between the regular and runoff elections was almost 10 points - large enough that the winning plurality in the first election was greater than the winning majority in the runoff.
According to current university rules and common sense, elections cannot run into reading period, which means that a runoff will necessarily be hasty, difficult or impossible to regulate, and occur when students are gearing up for finals and campus media has shut down. Which is why, incidentally, some of our "representatives" created a convenient loophole by which to avoid them.
Instant runoff voting would function within the UCS constitution, clarify the elections process, raise turnout, and allow better planning in a short spring semester. Here's how it works: Instead of voting for a one candidate, voters rank candidates in order of choice. If no candidate achieves a simple majority, then the one with lowest total is dropped, and another round is tallied, in which each ballot goes to its top remaining choice.
If your first choice is still in the race, your ballot stays with them. If they are eliminated, your ballot automatically counts for your next choice. In traditional instant runoff voting, the process continues until one candidate has a majority.
According to a strict interpretation of the UCS constitution, instant runoff voting at Brown would mean eliminating all but the top two candidates for the second round. Even this would be an improvement over the current election method.
But I would urge a slightly looser interpretation. If we allow that traditional instant runoff voting automatically guarantees a constitutionally legitimate run-off, then situations like last year - when an 11-vote margin determined which two candidates would enter a runoff - would be eliminated.
In a four candidate race, the ballots for the weakest would go to the remaining three in a second round, giving voters a chance to "respond" to the close race for second.
Duke, Carleton College, MIT, Princeton, Rice, Reed, Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, and Wisconsin all use instant-run-off Voting, not to mention the governments of the City of London and Australia, and the American Political Science Association.
Both Howard Dean and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., support national instant runoff voting, as did our City Council representative, David Segal, on this very page.
Because of the consistent glut in contested positions, instant runoff voting would only directly affect the presidential race, at least initially. In fact, several candidates for president brought up instant run-off voting last year but were told that there was too little time to overcome the technical challenges and that it could not be done on WebCT.
Quite frankly, it felt like we were blown off.
But now we've got the whole year ahead of us, and reforming our elections process is a top issue. So UCS should find a computer program or commission someone to create one. It should pass the necessary code changes. And it should implement instant runoff voting now.
Ari Savitzky '06 wants you, the right way, baby.
