|
IRV at Rice University
April 2003
Rice uses Instant Runoff Voting
for campus-wide officer elections and has for at least 25 years.
Students can vote from any networked computer on campus, and we have
a description of the IRV method on the website. We have a
student-written computer program that then tabulates the results and
produces a round-by-round description of how many first place votes
each candidate received and which candidates were eliminated in
which round of redistribution. (Having the program to count the
votes is a huge help, especially in years when we have many
candidates. What used to take hours now only takes a minute or two.)
We find there's a significant benefit in using
IRV (or, as we call it, Preferential Voting) in that we never have
to worry about holding runoff
elections. We also get a better idea of which candidate is
the most acceptable for the full student body and it eliminates the
problems of simple plurality elections, like vote-splitting among
candidates.
On the downside, even though we've used this
system for as long as we have, many voters still fail to understand
how it works and why it matters that they choose their rankings
carefully. We see fairly sharp drop-offs in the number of votes as
candidates are eliminated because students often only indicate their
first choice.
We've tried to combat this by informing students
about the voting system in a lot of ways. We have the description of
the tabulation of the votes on the ballot, and this year I suggested
that our newspaper write a editorial emphasizing the importance of
each ranking. (You can read the article here: http://thresher.rice.edu/article.tcl?issue_id=37&dept_id=3&article_id=997)
We also placed a reminder about this on the front page of the
candidate blurbs, which are also run in the newspaper.
In the end, I think IRV is a much better system
than plurality as long as your voters are educated about the system.
This is harder than one might think because the tabulation method
for IRV is complicated. However, I think the benefits of the system
definitely outweigh any voter education problems that arise.
Matt Haynie
Rice Student Association
President, 2002-2003
|
