We do have district elections, though the "districts" are the various schools/colleges at the University (Literature Science & Arts, Engineering, Business, etc). These have seats proportional to the number of students in the school, with a minimum of 1 seat for each school. Literature, Science, & Arts (LSA), the largest school, gets 19 seats, followed by the Rackham Graduate School with 7, Engineering with 6, Business with 3, and the smaller colleges with 2 or 1 depending on size. These seats are also further divided between two yearly elections (for instance, LSA elects 10 in the spring and 9 in the fall).
Currently, if I were to propose STV it would be with the existing divisions and electoral cycles. Obviously, there wouldn't be proportionality in the single-member districts, though these schools are generally won by independent write-in candidates that aren't part of a major party slate due to their small size and the fact that these students are typically less interested in student government. It doesn't seem like it would be that large of an issue to just use IRV (or even plurality) for these seats. However, 75% of the seats (and around 90% of those who actually SHOW UP at meetings) are in the larger schools with multi-member districts. Those also happen to be the ones that are dominated by the party slates... The problem, of course, seems to be selling people on STV. I'm only one person, and though I'm an elected representative (and thus can introduce a resolution), I do need 2/3 of the other representatives to vote for this in order to hold a referendum to adopt it. That is the problem - they see the existing ranking system (points-based) as "simple" compared to the complex transfers of STV. In fact, STV was actually used at one point and scrapped for this very reason (though this was 20 years ago back when paper ballots were still used). Any other suggestions? Tim On 4/16/07, Bob Richard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Tim and all, Among colleges and universities adopting proportional or semi-proportional systems, STV is the overwhelming favorite. If students at (for example) Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon can figure it out, then students at the University of Michigan probably can too. The (alleged) complexity of STV is entirely a matter of the counting process; the task for the voter is actually very simple. Having said that, the conventional ways of explaining the count invariably lose audiences, and we need to learn how to present it better. If you currently had district elections (from dormitories or neighborhoods), you could propose mixed member proportional (MMP). But that doesn't sound like your situation. Bob Richard Publications Director Californians for Electoral Reform http://www.cfer.org P.O. Box 235 Kentfield, CA 94914-0235 (415) 256-9393 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Tim Hull Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 9:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [EM] PR in student government... Hi, I e-mailed this list a while back about election methods in student government. I'm at the University of Michigan, and we use a variant of the Borda count for our elections where you get as many votes as open seats. Slates of candidates typically contest elections as "parties", and most discussion of elections revolves around these parties. Anyway, the system as-is works better than at-large plurality, but it still leaves much to be desired. The biggest problem with the current system is that the largest party slate always wins a disproportionately high number of seats - so large, in fact, that competition has generally withered away. As a result, I'm looking at proportional representation systems - and possibly introducing one as a ballot initiative for next year. However, I have experienced great trouble in finding a system that people like. Single Transferable Vote seems ideal, but it has the drawback of being complex (and, as a result, hard for people to comprehend). Party lists are simpler, but they force voters to support an entire party - not ideal at all. Does anyone have any suggestions? I was actually recently elected to a representative seat as the only independent candidate to defeat the dominant party slate, and am planning to introduce something. I just need to be able to convince others... Tim Hull ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
