At its final meeting of Fall Quarter, the A.S. Council
unanimously passed a resolution to implement instant runoff voting in its
elections, fulfilling a torrent of pleas from students and campus organizations
that began in 2003.
Biological Sciences Senator and council Speaker Emma Sandoe
said the group has overwhelmingly supported the voting system for years — in
fact, the council passed a resolution to adopt IRV in 2003 — but the logistics
of implementing it on TritonLink, where all voting takes place, have been out
of the council’s control.
“We’ve just been waiting for TritonLink’s approval,” she
said.
The approval finally came last month, when TritonLink
officials said that they were capable of maintaining the system. The council
wasted no time, enacting the initiative less than a week later on Dec. 5.
The IRV system allows voters to rank candidates in order of
preference, ensuring that the winning candidate has the broadest support. If no
candidate receives a majority after voters’ first choices have been tallied,
the candidate with the fewest number of first-place votes is eliminated, and
votes are retabulated until at least 50 percent of votes go to one candidate.
Currently, the system only applies to A.S. officers and
academic division senators. Sandoe said that the council’s decision is a step in
the right direction.
“[The system] gives people more of a choice, and the whole
campus will probably move over eventually,” she said.
Earl Warren College alumnus Daniel Watts, who served as vice
chairman of the Voting Systems Task Force that researched IRV in 2003,
submitted a letter to councilmembers last month urging them to finish what he
said was a major battle in his UCSD career.
“For years, only TritonLink’s bureaucracy stood in the way
of a more progressive and fair voting system for UCSD,” he said. “And now
they’ve finally responded. Please, please support generations of your
predecessors, and approve IRV.”
Opponents of IRV have historically claimed that the system’s
more complex methodology will confuse voters, thus reducing turnout. However,
Sandoe pointed out that voters will be able to rank as many or as few
candidates as they wish, and she said that if anything, the new system would
encourage increased participation.
“Most other major universities have the same system, and
they have higher voter turnout,” she said. “People are going to vote no matter
what, and the new system won’t slow them down.”
IRV received national attention in the 2000 presidential
election, when many voters decried the current plurality system, alleging that
votes for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader contributed to former Vice
President Al Gore’s loss of electoral votes in Florida.
In a December e-mail to the A.S. Council, former A.S.
President Harry Khanna cited the Nader example as well as the Green Party’s
resulting campaign to implement IRV in national elections.
He emphasized that IRV will address the old campus voting
system that he considered to be “inherently undemocratic.”
“The current system encourages two major ‘slates’ and makes
it virtually impossible for independent candidates to win,” he said. “IRV
ensures proportional representation so that one slate can never dominate the
entire council.”
