With less than one week to implement a new voting system for the upcoming Duke Student Government executive elections, members have decided to postpone any major changes until next year.
Instead, presidential candidates will need a plurality by 10 percent, increased from the usual 6 percent plurality, to win.
DSG legislators narrowly approved an amendment to the election bylaw two weeks ago that would require a majority vote for a candidate to win the presidency and Instant Runoff Voting. That system would have had students rank the presidential candidates according to preference. Using those rankings, IRV would have redistributed votes--beginning with the candidate with the least votes--until a candidate earned a majority.
However, after consulting the Office of Information and Technology, DSG officials decided there was not enough time to implement IRV for the executive elections Tuesday.
"I'm really glad with the decision because I was tentative from the beginning," said DSG Attorney General William Fagan, a senior who will oversee the March 4 executive elections. "My job is one of implementation and making sure that the election is an equitable process. It was way too close of a call to put it through. You have to do a lot on the programming side to make it look fairly simple on the interface side that the voter would see."
The bylaw amendment included Fagan's proposal to increase the required 6 percent plurality to a 10 percent plurality for a presidential candidate to win. All other executive candidates will still need a 6 percent plurality to win.
Justin Ford, DSG executive vice president and a senior, originally proposed that a presidential candidate receive a majority or face a runoff with the next highest vote recipient.
However, since no DSG president has ever received the majority vote, each election would likely have resulted in a runoff. With IRV, proposed by sophomore Ryan Kennedy to change Ford's original amendment, a computer would conduct that runoff.
"It's not opposition to the idea. It's just wanting to make sure that we implement the technology correctly," said Kennedy, who hopes to use IRV for the presidential election next year. In the future, though, Kennedy said he would consider proposing that all executive elections use IRV.
Other universities, including Stanford, Princeton and Johns Hopkins, currently use that system in their student government elections.
With the new 10 percent plurality, though, a presidential runoff may be more likely than in previous years. Current DSG President Joshua Jean-Baptiste won last year's election by a 6.11 percent margin. Two years ago, C.J. Walsh, Trinity '02, won the presidency by a 6.8 percent margin.
"I know that that increases the chances of a runoff, but I guess that's what we have to deal with," Fagan said, adding that a runoff was much less likely than under a required majority.
In the case of such a runoff, the top two candidates will go head to head no more than five class days after March 4--potentially after Spring Break.
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