The results of the Student Association elections were supposed to be published today, so I was surprised to see an email in my Inbox this morning saying that the presidential race hasn't been decided yet. According to the email, none of the four teams running for the position got more than 50% of the vote, so the co-COO's have started a one-day runoff where each voter is supposed to pick a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice. From what the COO's told each of us candidates in an email a couple of hours ago, the two teams with the most 1st place votes will have both their 1st and 2nd place votes counted and the other two teams will have their 2nd place votes counted and whichever team gets the plurality of those votes will be declared the winning team. If none of the teams has a plurality at that point, then the 3rd place votes will be counted, as well. I hope I'm describing this correctly because I'm not 100% sure that I understand it all.
This whole process worries me, not because it is going to decide whether I get to be co-president, but because I am wondering whether it is the best way to do this. [EDITED - I was just sent an explanation of how the voting will work and the two scenarios I was imagining wouldn't go down...the preferential system of electing is set up differently] These outcomes don't seem like they'd be in the spirit of who the class would be indicating that they want by virtue of the 1st place votes they made. To make matters worse, neither the candidates nor the voters were told that a team had to get over 50% of the votes in the first election to win (I think there may have been something in the SA Senate bylaws about this, so I'll have to check there to be sure). I had a bunch of people come to me with questions about this earlier today and I had no idea of how to answer them. No matter how it turns out, I think the results will be challenged and I doubt that it'll be any of the candidates who raise the challenge. This could be a very intetresting day or two around here...
Posted by marquis930 at March 1, 2005 11:52 PM