Students Employ New Voting System
ASUCD Technologists Create Software To Handle Online Election

With 135 candidates to choose from, we thought we had a lot of voting options in our recent Governor Recall election. But one month later, on

No, Jimmy Carter didn't run for ASUCD senate; he simply appeared on the ASUCD's sample balot so that students could take a crack at choice voting before the big election day. To get a look at the recent ASUCD election process, visit their site at http://elections.ucdavis.edu.

November 12 to 14, UC Davis students found their voting options even more diverse. For the first time on campus, students used the new Choice Voting system in which voters don’t just choose their favorite candidate, they can also rank as many other candidates as they choose in their order of preference. With 16 candidates on the ballot (to fill six ASUCD senators seats), this sort of system requires sophisticated software to tally the voting and a smooth integration of that software onto the election Web site, where students cast their votes electronically.

In traditional voting systems, the candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of whether he or she has a majority of the vote. For instance, the well-known winner of the recent California Recall election actually garnered less than a statistical majority, bringing in only 49% of the vote. Last winter, however, UC Davis undergraduates voted to pass an amendment to the ASUCD constitution, making choice voting the official voting system for ASUCD elections. Choice voting
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  • Online Elections Pick Up Steam
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  • ASUCD Elections Site
  • stipulates a candidate must receive a majority of the vote (or a threshold of the votes in multi-winner elections) in order to take office, and it ensures majority support by taking into account voters’ second, third, and fourth choices.

    Choice Voting Demystified
    Called ‘Instant Run-Off Voting’ when one winner is being elected and ‘Single-Transferable Voting’ when multiple winners are elected, choice voting seems like a mathematical puzzle at first.

    UC Davis voters log on to the secure elections Web site where they can view candidate’s pictures, read candidate bios and cast their vote (ASUCD elections have been entirely online for several years). Voters click on candidate pictures to rank them in order of first choice, second choice, third choice and so on. It should be noted, however, that voters are not required to rank all the candidates; they can rank as many or as few as they wish.
    In single-winner elections, if no single candidate receives a majority of the vote, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated from the race. The losing candidate’s votes are then re-distributed among the remaining candidates based on voters’ next available choice indications. The tallying continues through rounds of elimination and re-tallying until one candidate receives a majority of the votes.

    When electing more than one person, as in the case of the recent ASUCD election, winning candidates must achieve a threshold of the vote, in this case roughly 14% or 350 votes. If none of the candidates receive the threshold, elimination rounds begin. On the other hand, if a candidate exceeds the voting threshold, a portion of his or her excess votes over the threshold are divided among the voters’ next choices. Sound confusing?

    Check out the ASUCD election results page at http://asucd.ucdavis.edu/elections/ to get an idea of how the votes and fractions-of-votes transfer from candidate to candidate through the tallying rounds.

    With all this cascading of votes through multiple rounds, the tallying process can seem a bit dizzying. According to mathematics graduate student Chris Jerdonek, one of the students who helped raise campus interest in choice voting, Cambridge, Massachusettes and UC Berkeley began tallying their choice voting elections by hand, using nothing more than a pen, paper and good old-fashioned mathematics. When UC Davis adopted choice voting, the decision to use a computer for vote-tallying was a no-brainer. The only question was what software to use.

    Preparing the Technology for Election Day
    ASUCD called upon its media and technology staff early in the summer to begin designing vote-tallying software and a user-friendly voting Web site for the upcoming fall election. The elections Web site and vote-tallying software were developed by ASUCD Creative Media student employees Tom Burnett and DJ Davis and staff programmer Alex Park. The ASUCD-created system is double-checked by professional choice voting software, ChoicePlus, which is used at a handful of other universities around the country.

    Burnett, who did most of the programming to create the vote-tallying software, said that it took three revisions to get every aspect of the Cold Fusion and Oracle-backed program correct. There were many challenges that came along with the project, including making the Web site compatible with all the different Web browsers in use by student voters, and ensuring that the program’s voting sessions wouldn’t time-out on voters before they had a chance to select all their preferences.

    “We had a mock election with a few hundred people in order to give our software a trial run,” says Park. The programmers also posted a sample ballot –featuring past American presidents posing as candidates– on the site in the weeks prior to the election so that students could get a feel for the new voting process ahead of time.

    Student Voters Adjust to New System
    Using the choice voting system for the first time, most voters failed to take advantage of the chance to rank all 16 candidates, generally logging on, voting for their six slate candidates, and logging off. Election Committee Chair Mary Ball feels it will “take a while” for people to get used to the system. Some students, such as geology undergraduate Dierdre Williams found the process of marking multiple preferences a bit “tedious.” However, Dan Reilly, an undergraduate studying classics felt the extra pointing-and-clicking was worth it since “choice voting allows the voter to split votes into a more realistic and accomodating ranking system instead of the black/white voting of previous years.”



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