The A.S. Council allocated over $15,000 for the implementation of instant runoff voting on StudentLink at its March 31 meeting. The online system would be operational in time for next year’s A.S. elections.
No senators opposed the allocation, which was approved by a vote of 20-0-1. One segment of the allocation earmarks $1,500 for the purchase of voting tabulation software from Voting Solutions, a Northern California-based company. The second segment allocates $13,920 for changes to the current voting software used on StudentLink.
“This is not a one-year investment or a two-year investment or something like that,” Eleanor Roosevelt College Sophomore Senator Max Harrington said. “It’s a permanent investment.”
The funding also allows Administrative Computing and Telecommunications to hire additional programmers to complete the project by April 2005. According to the estimate provided by A.C.T., instant runoff voting modifications will take 11.6 weeks to complete.
“Unfortunately, a lot of people who are familiar with software development will think it shouldn’t take that long to code it and they’re absolutely correct,” said Margaret Backer, manager of strategic projects at A.C.T. “Coding is only 20 percent of an entire project.”
The new software must undergo lengthy and rigorous testing before it is approved for use, according to Backer.
“There’s a lot of work involved in making just minor changes and these are actually pretty complex,” Backer said.
The road to implement instant runoff voting has been plagued with obstacles. StudentLink programmers informed the council in January 2004 that other programming projects would delay the creation of online instant runoff voting for at least a year.
The council then scrambled to re-write the A.S. Elections Bylaws to allow for a standard runoff scenario for this quarter’s A.S. elections.
The allocation for instant runoff voting will come from the A.S. Council’s mandated reserves account, which is earmarked for unexpected expenditures.
“I was surprised there wasn’t any opposition to it at all,” Vice President Finance Eric Webster said. “I expected it to be a lot more controversial.”
Webster said that this allocation from mandated reserves, along with a $60,000 allocation for the new ropes course earlier this year, may threaten next year’s stipends for councilmembers. Stipends are paid from interest generated from mandated reserves.
Instant runoff voting allows voters to rate candidates in order of choice. A candidate must receive a majority of the first-choice votes to win the race. If no candidate receives a majority, then the candidate who received the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. Voters who ranked the eliminated candidate first will have their vote transferred to their second choice. The cycle of eliminating candidates and transferring votes is repeated until a candidate has a majority of the first-choice vote.
While StudentLink must be modified to accommodate the ranking system required in instant runoff voting, the actual tabulation of ballots will be computed by third-party software from Voting Solutions.
Voting Solutions software normally costs $15,000, but UCSD will be able to acquire the software for 10 percent of the price because it will be used in a non-profit and non-governmental environment.
“You have to remember that the three people who are the partners in this company are not really business people, we’re really electoral reform activists and we’d like to see this kind of voting done in more places,” said Steve Willett, chief operating officer of Voting Solutions.
Voting Solutions software has been used by Cambridge, Mass., for city council elections since the mid-1990s. Willett said his software may be the only utility in the world used to tabulate instant runoff elections for governments.
Now that the use of instant runoff voting is in sight, Harrington hopes that college councils will adopt the system for their own elections.
“If you have two people of the same mindset, for example, both wanting to run … IRV will encourage them to both run, as opposed to our current system where they are afraid of splitting the vote,” Harrington said. “I think it will improve things a lot, hopefully.”
