The Student Government Association's elections are quickly approaching. Hallways will soon be plastered with posters, sidewalks will be decorated with chalk and candidates will be running around the campus soliciting your vote. And if any of these candidates for executive office fail to reach a voting threshold of 40 percent, there will be an intermission, and then the circus will return for its grand finale: the run-off election.

Now what if I told you I could eliminate half the circus and its cost (in terms of money, time, emotion and energy)? At next Wednesday's SGA meeting (6:00 p.m., 2111 Stamp Student Union), your elected legislators will be voting on a bill I have introduced that intends to eliminate run-off elections. The bill further proposes to replace run-off elections with the sophisticated method of Instant Run-Off Voting (commonly known as IRV). Before I explain what IRV is, it's important to understand the problems with run-off elections.

First, executive office candidates only have to receive 40 percent of the undergraduate vote to assume office. This literally leaves the opportunity for a candidate to be opposed by 60 percent of the voting student body and still win office.

Second, since 40 percent is rarely reached when three or more viable candidates seek office, run-off elections are held often.

Third, a run-off election usually has a smaller voter turnout than the main election. By holding a run-off election, we are essentially losing votes that were cast in a main election. Do you as a student really have the extra time to vote twice in two weeks?

Finally, run-off elections cost everyone involved more money, time, energy and emotions. If a run-off election is held, the SGA will most likely have to spend an extra $600 to advertise in The Diamondback. Candidates in a run-off will be forced to spend more money campaigning an extra week, and the registrar's office will have to use its personnel again to tabulate the results of another election.

Elections are also exhausting, emotionally and physically. Anyone who ran last year will tell you that the biggest SPANKing was on his or her GPA, and the REAL winner was whoever wasn't emotionally and physically drained when it was all said and done. An extra week of campaigning can sometimes mean a letter grade or two, hours of lost sleep and a roller coaster of emotions.

So how do we hold an election without a run-off, and still force a candidate to receive at least 51 percent of the vote? The solution is Instant Run-Off Voting.

With IRV, students rank their candidates in order of preference. For example, let's say there were three candidates for president: Gore, Bush and Nader. A voter has the option of ranking his or her candidates from one to three, or not ranking at all. So let's say Student X ranks Nader as number one, Gore as number two and Bush as number three.

Assume that once the votes are tallied, the initial count distributed 45 percent of the vote to Bush, 45 percent to Gore and 10 percent to Nader. Under IRV, a software program will automatically place Bush and Gore in a run-off. All the votes for Nader will be transferred by their ranking preferences. In the case of Student X, the next best choice after Nader is Gore. Therefore Student X's vote would transfer to Gore. Once the program transfers the votes, a majority would be achieved and a winner declared.

But there's another reason IRV is effective. Unlike the current system, it does not violate the logical fallacy of "false dilemma," otherwise known as limiting your choices to "all or nothing." With IRV, voters are given a middle ground, a ranking system. In the aforementioned example, if Nader were eliminated, who was the next favorite candidate? Under IRV the voter has more colors to choose than just black and white. As you can probably see by now, this system eliminates not only run-offs but also spoiler candidates.

But don't be fooled, eliminating spoilers does not mean eliminating third-party challengers. Instead, IRV levels the playing field for third-party candidates. Because of a ranking system, voters will no longer feel their vote is wasted if they vote third party or independent.

If this method of election reform is important to you, please attend the SGA meeting this Wednesday and tell a legislator. With your support we no longer have to waste your student fees, and candidates will no longer have to waste their time, money and energy. And once the votes are calculated, the true winner will be efficiency.

Eric Swalwell is the chairman of the SGA committee on governmental affairs. He can be reached at [email protected].