By Matthew Stoller
Published February 28th 2006 in The Hoya
No GUSA president in the past half-decade has garnered a majority of the votes, period. The majority of winning tickets have had to make due with pluralities in the mid-30s. This de-legitimizes the winning tickets and increases the cost of so-called “spoiler candidates” — any third party candidates, however well-intentioned they may be, who have little chance of winning but merely siphon off votes from the two main tickets.
Last year’s election had nine tickets, with victor Pravin Rajan (SFS ’07) winning about 36 percent of the vote, the second-place ticket garnering some 26 percent and the remaining 40 or so percent divvied up among seven tickets. Having 60-70 percent of Georgetown students against you going into office hardly sets you off to a good start.
There is another way. It’s called “instant runoff voting,” or IRV. With IRV, voters rank each ticket in order of their preference: Their favorite candidate is first, then their second-favorite and so on down the line. A blank candidate entry would be available to allow for write-in candidates. Voting then proceeds in rounds.
If, after the first round of voting no candidate achieves a majority (that is, 51 percent of the vote, not merely a plurality), the last-placed candidate is eliminated and their votes redistributed according to whatever their voters’ placed as their second-favorite candidate. If there is still no majority after that, the last-placed candidate in the second round of voting is eliminated, and his or her votes are redistributed according to his or her second-favorite choice (if the second-favorite choice happens to be the eliminated candidate, it would simply go to the third-place choice and so on). These rounds continue until finally one candidate has a majority.
This is beneficial for several reasons. First, it ensures that whoever is elected president will enter office with a majority of voters backing him or her. A corollary to this is that the winning candidate will have to appeal to many voters as his or her second-favorite choice if not first. This means that a candidate cannot appeal to one specific group to try and win the vote — the international students, the sports players, the GUSA elites, SFS students, etc. — but rather must branch out to enlist other voters.
IRV also allows voters to “vote their conscience” or vote for one of their friends (generally a bigger issue in Assembly elections) without helping to elect a candidate one does not want to get in office — a Green party voter, for example, having to choose between Nader and Gore, knowing that a Nader vote is essentially a vote for Bush.
A recent Georgetown example comes from last year’s presidential ticket of Nilou Huff (SFS ’06) and Anders Fremstad (COL ’06), which was solely focused on the living wage proposal and was primarily running to publicize its candidates’ viewpoint. All living wage-inclined voters could have felt free to vote for Huff without penalizing their second-choice candidate, both making a statement without at the same time removing their support for a more well-rounded candidate.
Finally, the voting is instant, so there is no need to hold two or more elections to narrow it down to the two highest vote-getters to determine a majority.
According to www.fairvote.org, many prominent student government associations are already using IRV, including those at Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and some 30 other universities, and the best part is that it’s very easy to implement. An IRV system will force candidates to become more appealing to the majority of students and ensure that, in turn, the majority of students will favor the incoming president, giving GUSA more legitimacy.
It might not give us weekend GUTS buses or campus-wide wireless Internet access, but IRV is certainly a step in the right direction.
Matthew Stoller is a sophomore in the College and a staffer on the Murchison-Ishtiaq campaign.
