No voting system is perfect, but Ross Margulies has a vision for a SSMU election system that he thinks can come closer.

Margulies, U3 Political Science and Arts Undergraduate Society VP Finance, is collecting signatures for a referendum question to change SSMU�s single-winner elections to instant-runoff voting (IRV).

�What we have is not democratic,� said Margulies.

The SSMU constitution currently states winners are elected by a plurality of votes, meaning the person with the most number of votes wins, even if that candidate received fewer than half of the votes. Margulies has proposed changing the current system, also know as first-past-the-post (FPTP), to IRV, in which a majority of votes, i.e. more than half, would be required to win.

In IRV, voters rank candidates. If any candidate receives fewer than half the votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to the others according to the next-highest preference of each voter. This process continues until someone gets a majority.

�IRV is a system that allows a candidate with majority support to get elected,� said Margulies.

Margulies said that in the last five years, seven SSMU executives were elected without support from the majority of voters, so he talked to other students to figure out what the best solution was.

�We had a debate. There was a large group of people,� he said. �We looked into results for [other systems] and IRV,� as well as the current FPTP system, and IRV was the winner.

SSMU wouldn�t be the first student union to consider IRV. According to FairVote, an organization that supports changing voting systems in the U.S. to more proportional ones, many student unions are turning to IRV. They point to universities, such Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and the University of California at Berkeley, who have adoped the model. Margulies interned at FairVote last summer.

�They were very successful,� said Jack Santucci, a Research Fellow at FairVote and a McGill Political Science graduate. �They have a very low error rate.�

IRV is also used in Ireland, Australia, Malta, and some city councils in the U.S. In Canada, B.C. had a referendum in 2005 on switching to single transferable vote (STV), a similar system for multi-winner elections, which got 57 per cent support but failed due to the supermajority referendum requirement of 50 per cent plus one in 60 per cent of all constituencies. P.E.I. held a similar referendum while Ontario and Quebec have established commissions to look at new voting systems.

�This is a system well-tested in American politics,� said Santucci. �Internationally, it�s been used for over a century.�

According to the Chief Returning Officer of Elections McGill, Bryan Badali, IRV would not be very difficult to implement.

�All it would require is a modification to the OVS software,� which is used to run elections, Badali said. �They would have their tech guy work at it.�

�However they choose to implement it is up to SSMU,� he added.

Although the referendum would mandate the change for the spring 2008 election period, Margulies thought it could be done more quickly.

�If all things go well, this will be running in fall 2007,� he said.

However, he stressed that what matters most is that students are engaged in the process.

�It�s good for citizens to be engaged, to be learning, to be excited,� Margulies said. �It�s important for voters to know how the system works and why we�re doing it.�