By Ali Alemozafar
Published April 8th 2003 in The Stanford Daily
At 12:01 a.m. this Wednesday, ballot.stanford.edu will open to accept voting by undergraduate and graduate students for special fees and executive, class and senatorial positions. The process will end on Thursday at 11:59 p.m. The process of voting is largely unchanged from past years.
Undergraduates can vote for up to 15 undergraduate senators, though it is possible to vote for as few as only one. Graduate students will vote for representatives to the Graduate Student Council and for joint special-fee groups.
The Internet server will ask for a voter’s current academic year so that they vote on the proper class slates.
A ranking system is used by the voting software to create an automatic runoff between competing executive and class candidates.
Two slates are competing for the ASSU executive this year. Voters will rank each of the slates as either a first or second choice.
In instant runoff voting, if no ballot wins 50 percent of the first-place votes, the one with the fewest first-place votes will be eliminated. A computer program will then recount the ballots that marked the eliminated slate as first, counting the second-place votes cast on those ballots.
If a slate still does not have 50 percent of the first-place votes, the ballot with the next-fewest votes is eliminated and the process is repeated. This is the third year the ASSU has used instant runoff voting.
A runoff is necessary since ASSU election guidelines require that a slate must receive a majority of the votes to win.
The outcome of the special fees ballot will determine which groups will be allocated special fees by the ASSU.
Voters will select which groups they wish to allocate special fees. The program will tally the total fee and display a real-time sum.
Voters will be able to receive information on the special fees online by clicking on the appropriate item.
“Students will be receiving a flyer under their door with a list of all candidates and summaries of their platforms,” said junior Marcus Williams, the ASSU elections media director.
Election Day '09 was a roller-coaster for election reformers. Instant runoff voting had a great night in Minnesota, where St. Paul voters chose to implement IRV for its city elections, and Minneapolis voters used IRV for the first time—with local media touting it as a big success. As the Star-Tribune noted in endorsing IRV for St. Paul, Tuesday’s elections give the Twin Cities a chance to show the whole state of Minnesota the benefits of adopting IRV. There were disappointments in Lowell and Pierce County too, but high-profile multi-candidate races in New Jersey and New York keep policymakers focused on ways to reform elections; the Baltimore Sun and Miami Herald were among many newspapers publishing commentary from FairVote board member and former presidential candidate John Anderson on how IRV can mitigate the problems of plurality elections.