Georgetown undergrads use IRV again
The Hoya reports that Georgetown University undergrads will use instant runoff voting to elect their president (and VP) for the second time. The GU Student Association implemented IRV last year.
“This year, the campaign field is one of the most crowded ever,†Election Commission member Maura Cassidy (COL ’08) said.
It’s hard to tell whether that’s because students are responding to the incentive to run. Nevertheless there are eight contending slates.
Candidates run as two-person tickets for president and vice president. Effectively, this is a single winner election.
The GUSA also uses IRV for student senate elections. There are 23 single-member “districts” corresponding to living arrangements. According to their site, last year’s reforms included:
geographical representation for the Senate - too few students know their Student Association Senator. by creating districts based on where you live, rather than what grade you’re in, we hope that students will have more day-to-day interaction with their representative to the Student Association
It would be interesting to know:
- what’s being done in terms of voter education
- what proportion of voters (will) have skipped rankings
- what proportion of voters (will) have used the same ranking more than once
- what proportions of voters (will) have used what proportions of their rankings
Duplicate rankings would be the most fatal error, followed by skipped rankings. High rates would indicate need for more vigorous voter education.
Bob Richard on 13 Feb 2008 at 12:08 pm #
Skipped rankings needn’t be a problem. Just look at the next candidate in the voter’s ordering; the voter’s intent is always clear. Most implementations of IRV allow this.
Most implementations do forbid duplicate rankings, but that’s not really necessary. Just give half a vote to each of the tied candidates. Handling fractional votes isn’t a problem if the software or manual procedures already do STV.
Speaking of STV, maybe Georgetown will rethink single-member districts for the student senate, after they’ve had some experience with ranked ballots.
Jack on 14 Feb 2008 at 6:41 pm #
They thought about multi-member districts:
“[GUSA implemented] geographical representation for the Senate - too few students know their Student Association Senator. by creating districts based on where you live, rather than what grade you’re in, we hope that students will have more day-to-day interaction with their representative to the Student Association”