TO THE EDITOR:
For those who are newer to campus than others, you may not remember the “joys” of the run-off election. The time honored tradition where no candidate for student body president gets 50 percent plus 1 of the vote, and the top two candidates have to campaign for another week. The campaign staffs are worn by fatigue, students have to endure another week of shouting in the Pit and ultimately candidates spend most of their time informing people that they do, in fact, have to vote again.
Last year, Mr. Opere was able to build enough of a coalition to avoid the run-off election, but this was the exception to the rule. Moving forward, there is another way to give students a fair, democratic election. For the past three years, RHA has conducted its Governor elections using preferential “Instant Run Off” voting.
In this system, voters rank candidates in order of their preference. The system then eliminates the last place candidate and reassigns votes to each voter’s second choice. This process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes.
I know the usual criticisms of this proposal: “But we need that additional week of campaigning to reach voters.”
If that truly is the case, why not just extend the campaign period?
Also, Mr. Opere was clearly able to spread his message just fine without having an additional week of run-off campaigning.
Now that we have seen that our student election process does not hinge upon the two-round system of voting, perhaps it is time to critically evaluate our system once again.
Taylor Bates
