Supporters of Choice Voting Amendment lobby on Thursday
By Hilary Costa

February 3, 2003

 

With no legislation on the agenda at Thursday night's ASUCD Senate meeting, the senate took time to hear a 20-minute presentation by supporters of the Choice Voting System, an electoral procedure that students will evaluate in the winter 2003 ASUCD election.

Sonny Mohammadzadeh and Chris Jerdonek spoke about the merits of their proposed voting system, which is also referred to as Instant Runoff

Voting for presidential/vice presidential elections, and Single

Transferable Voting for senate elections.

If their ballot measure is passed by 60 percent of the voters, it will

institute a ranking system in ASUCD elections similar to those already

implemented at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, California Institute of

Technology and many other universities across the country.

"In your opinion, what system truly represents the people better: A system that allows minorities to elect all or a majority of senators, or that

truly, proportionally represents students accurately?" Mohammadzadeh

asked.

He noted that Choice Voting would eliminate the cost of runoff

presidential elections, which have occurred at UC Davis five times in the

past nine years.

In explaining the system's benefits on a larger scale, Mohammadzadeh said that Choice Voting would have prevented the controversy over the 2000 U.S. Presidential election.

"It was actually a flaw of the system that caused Al Gore to lose,"

Mohammadzadeh said. "It's not Ralph Nader's fault. He has every right to run."

Mohammadzadeh and Jerdonek also presented slides outlining the benefits of Choice Voting, which they said included deterring negative

campaigning, since a candidate wants a voter to at least rank him second,

if not first.

"Of the 40 or so full-fledged democracies in the world, there are only

five that still use the winner-take-all system, such as the United

States," Mohammadzadeh said.

 

A series of slides also outlined the STV process for electing a

proportionally representative senate, using an example from a Cambridge, Mass. city council election. In this scenario, a candidate's votes in excess of a preordained, proportional minimum are distributed to the voters' second-choice candidates using an algorithm formula until the top candidates have equal representational support.

After their presentation had finished, those present used public

discussion time to ask Mohammadzadeh and Jerdonek follow-up questions about the system's merits and to comment on their support - or lack thereof - for the system.

Junior Kenneth Bloom spoke against the voting system, saying the language contained in the ballot measure does not define the runoff methods clearly enough, and that IRV has technical flaws. He used a whiteboard to draw an example of a case where a candidate with more votes actually ended up losing an election.

Mohammadzadeh, however, later refuted Bloom's example.

"These situations don't tend to be realistic," he said. "When you have

that many people voting, it's pretty damn hard to know how to rig the

system."

Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission Chair Atul Nair said he favored

amending the ASUCD election system, and that Choice Voting would

promote a "diversity of ideas" and make ASUCD elections "less binary."

But while some senators, as well as Nair, said they believed Choice Voting would eliminate the binary ticket system that dominates ASUCD

elections, Mohammadzadeh said he did not think it would "affect the ticket system much." Berkeley, he said, still has a "strong" two-slate system that uses Choice Voting.

As the question-and-answer session continued, however, some senators and commission chairs sitting around the table had tired of the hour-long

session, and wished to return to regular senate business.

"You should educate yourself and not force people to come and educate us," said Bob Gill, chair of the Academic Affairs Commission, advising the senators to visit websites posted by Mohammadzadeh in order to obtain more information.