2008 Woodie Awards
Possible change from DASB for student election voting systems
Aiselle De Vera
Issue date: 5/5/08 Section: News
An alternative voting system to be used in the upcoming elections, called approval voting, was proposed by De Anza Student Body Senator Robin Claassen to the senate election committee during its March 14 meeting. The proposal was not approved.
Claassen said, "Approval voting is a system with a higher degree of democratic excellence that's basically mathematically proven. [Approval voting] gets rid of the spoiler effect, and it gets rid of splitting the vote. So the splitting the vote and the spoiler effect are the two big problems of plurality voting."
Claassen said that the spoiler effect is not an issue in the DASB senate elections because there is no polling information. The DASB senate is largely unknown to voters prior to the beginning of campaigning.
Yet, splitting the vote is an issue, Claassen said. "What that is, if there are two candidates running who essentially have the same platform, well, that platform may be the platform that's most attractive to voters. The more candidates you have running for the same position, the fewer votes each of those candidates are going to get, and relatively the more votes the other candidates are going to get," he said.
Currently, the voting system used in the De Anza senate elections is plurality voting, which means that the candidate who receives the highest number of votes equal to or in excess of at least 20 percent of the total votes cast is the one who wins. In plurality voting, voters choose only one candidate per position. By contrast, approval voting allows voters to choose as many candidates as they wish, with the candidate who has the highest number of votes winning.
"It wasn't approved due to people not understanding what it was and also because student activities suggested it would be difficult to implement. That reflects the misunderstanding of the system because it takes just as much effort and time to implement plurality voting as it does for approval voting," said Claassen.
Claassen said, "Approval voting is a system with a higher degree of democratic excellence that's basically mathematically proven. [Approval voting] gets rid of the spoiler effect, and it gets rid of splitting the vote. So the splitting the vote and the spoiler effect are the two big problems of plurality voting."
Claassen said that the spoiler effect is not an issue in the DASB senate elections because there is no polling information. The DASB senate is largely unknown to voters prior to the beginning of campaigning.
Yet, splitting the vote is an issue, Claassen said. "What that is, if there are two candidates running who essentially have the same platform, well, that platform may be the platform that's most attractive to voters. The more candidates you have running for the same position, the fewer votes each of those candidates are going to get, and relatively the more votes the other candidates are going to get," he said.
Currently, the voting system used in the De Anza senate elections is plurality voting, which means that the candidate who receives the highest number of votes equal to or in excess of at least 20 percent of the total votes cast is the one who wins. In plurality voting, voters choose only one candidate per position. By contrast, approval voting allows voters to choose as many candidates as they wish, with the candidate who has the highest number of votes winning.
"It wasn't approved due to people not understanding what it was and also because student activities suggested it would be difficult to implement. That reflects the misunderstanding of the system because it takes just as much effort and time to implement plurality voting as it does for approval voting," said Claassen.
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