After deciding which Student Association tickets to vote for from the plethora of candidates, actually casting the vote should have been the easy part. But when Georgetown students logged on to vote last Thursday, they were greeted with a ballot that managed to be an online analogue to GUSA itself: confusing and tedious. Voting was so flawed that GUSA will hold a run-off between the top four tickets because the GUSA Senate refused to certify the results. It’s time to ditch the multiple-choice ballot and instant-runoff voting.
Instant-runoff voting, the system employed by the Election Commission, is useful sometimes, but a student government executive election is not one of them. Abandoning the system for a single-vote ballot in future years will make voting voting easier.
This isn’t GUSA’s first election fiasco; three out of last five elections have had some sort of complication. This year, the glaring problem was the ballot, which listed the tickets eight times, forcing students to hunt through eight options for their first choice, then repeat for each ticket after that.
If you got confused and accidentally chose the same duo twice—so many of the candidates blend together in real life, let alone on a ballot—your vote was not included in every round of run-off tabulation. It is a sign of how flawed the ballot was that voters who chose the same candidate twice could submit their ballots instead of receiving error messages.
Since the Election Commission insisted on using run-off voting, they should have listed the candidates once and allowed students to enter a number from one to eight next to each one. This, at least, would have been manageable. The run-off ballots were set up this way.
But the bigger issue is that the instant-runoff system so beloved by members of the Government Department, while useful for electing the Australian House of Representatives, has no place in a GUSA executive election.
Most students are familiar with the pair of candidates they want to vote for and few others, if any.
The Election Commission should allow students to simply pick the single pair of students they want to govern GUSA next year, the ticket that receives the most votes should win. While a run-off is a good idea, it should be had after an initial election that only lets students vote for one ticket.
A single vote system would end the confusing rankings and needless complains and ensure a straightforward democratic process. It’s an easy way to restore some credibility to an organization sadly lacking in it.
