| The Daily Orange |
SYRACUSE — The Student Association passed a bill Monday that switches from a majority-wins election system to ranked-choice voting. The bill details that ranked-choice voting will be used to elect the positions of president, vice president and comptroller.
”...students will be able to feel that their inputs are properly heard
Ranked-choice voting is a process in which a voter ranks their most preferred candidates. The bill states that if one candidate receives a majority of votes, then they will be declared the winner. If a winner is not chosen in the first round, there will be a second round of counting, during which the last candidate will be eliminated, and so on and so forth.
In the case of no candidate receiving a majority of votes, the person with the highest votes will be declared the winner pending ratification.
The bill also establishes a clause that if MySlice is technologically unable to provide ranked-choice voting, SA would then conduct the election via majority vote as it has previously.
David Bruen and Darnelle Stinfort, the president and vice president of SA respectively, said ranked-choice voting is a necessary addition to making the assembly more democratic and the election process smoother.
“Ranked-choice voting is really just a technical solution to a constitutional problem that we have,” Bruen said. “Our bylaws basically say that we have to get a simple majority to win, which is unreasonable if we have more than two candidates, which is pretty regular.”
Stinfort said she believes that through this new electoral process, students will be able to feel that their inputs are properly heard.
During the meeting, some assembly members voiced their confusion about the system and whether the SU electorate would feel the same way. Bruen said he’s confident that students would understand the system.
“Frankly, it’s a pretty straightforward thing to do. You just have to rank the candidates — and you don’t even have to do that. You can just rank your first one or two candidates. You don’t have to rank them all. Really, it’s not that complex,” Bruen said.
