By Devon Maylie
Published April 16th 2002 in Stanford Daily Online Edition
Due to instant runoff voting, who you rank as your second or third choices could determine the winner.
The process works like this: There are five slates running for ASSU president and vice president this year. Voters will rank the candidates first through fifth. The first-place votes are then tabulated. If no slate receives 50 percent of the votes after the first-place votes are tallied, then the slate with the fewest first-place votes will be eliminated.
Next, a program will re-count the ballots that marked the eliminated slate as first. The second-place votes will replace the original first choice.
If a slate still does not have 50 percent of the first-place votes, then the slate with the next-fewest votes is eliminated and the process repeats itself. This is the second year the ASSU has used instant runoff voting.
“In 2001, Matt Brewer and Christine Cordero received almost twice as many votes as the runner- up, so they were the clear favorites, but they did not have a majority mandate, because the vote was split among several other slates,” said former Graduate Student Council member Dave Robinson, a doctoral student in chemistry.
“[Last year], the instant runoff procedure eliminated the low-ranked slates, and found that enough of their voters supported Brewer and Cordero to give them a majority, so the issue was efficiently put to rest,” Robinson said.
Junior Gedioen Aloula, the ASSU election commissioner, added that “Instant runoff voting is not just a yes-or-no voting process. If your number one choice does not win, you can still contribute to the number two, three and four by ranking.”
Tim Riemann, the assistant commissioner of elections and a first-year law student, explained what this means to voters.
“Essentially, the slate receiving the voter’s first-place ranking will definitely receive the vote in the first round,” Riemann said.
“The slate receiving the voter’s fifth-place ranking will never receive a [first-place] vote from that voter. The slates receiving the voter’s second, third and fourth-place rankings may or may not ultimately receive a [first-place] vote from that voter depending on the vote total for the slates ranked higher by that individual voter.”
Due to a controversial runoff election in 2000, the votes are now tallied through the computer ranking system.
ASSU election guidelines stipulate that a candidate must receive a majority of the votes to win. As a result, a runoff is often necessary.
In the old system, the top candidates in a runoff would have to campaign for an extra two weeks after the original election and voters would have to recast their ballots. But this process was time-consuming and lead to a low voter turnout of only 20 percent—half the average general election turnout—during runoff elections, according to the ASSU.
A bill that instituted instant runoff voting co-authored by Robinson and Undergraduate Senator Charlene Ng passed last year.
According to Robinson, the instant runoff voting simplified the previous ASSU presidential election process.
Since the new election process had been implemented, Robinson said it is possible to determine the winner without having voters recast their votes.
Many California counties are starting to use instant runoff voting as well. In March, San Francisco voters approved an instant runoff ballot measure and in 1998 Santa Clara County voters authorized the use of instant runoff voting.
Voting begins today and ends tomorrow at midnight. All voting is conducted online at ballot.stanford.edu
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.