Despite some support for a first-past-the-post voting system, DSG elections will continue to be determined by instant runoff voting, the Senate decided last night.
Voters rank candidates by preference, and if no candidate receives a majority of votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and those votes are reassigned to the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until a candidate receives a majority of votes.
Duke Student Government President Mike Lefevre, a senior, endorsed instant runoff voting and said it will preserve as much voter influence in elections as possible. He said instant runoff gives students “a voice,” especially in elections in which there are upwards of eight people running.
DSG candidates will also need to be more mindful of how they use social media in future campaigns.
The Senate passed an amendment Wednesday that gives the Board of Elections the authority to determine the number of votes to dock for violations. The Board will review vote docking on a case-by-case basis as opposed to the previous policy of standardized penalties.
The change is partly a result of the changing role of social media in campaigns, said senior Ben Bergmann, athletics and campus services senator, who proposed the amendment.
“Is Twitter as big of a deal, is Facebook as big of a deal? I think these issues merit debate every year,” Bergmann said. “People didn’t really think videos were a bad idea until [former Young Trustee candidate] Chelsea Goldstein complained last year.”
Bergmann said the vote docking policy as it stands now “ties the hands of the Board of Elections and our future Senate body” and added that radical changes in how students campaign have occurred over the past 15 years. These changes will continue to happen and therefore affect the way vote docking is determined.
Executive Vice President Pete Schork, a junior, said the amendment would make the docking process arbitrary and added that it would be preferable to have a set number of votes assigned to each campaign violation.
“The idea is that [consequences] will be highly publicized, and people will actually follow the rules,” Schork said. “If they don’t follow the rules, any violations will be resolved in hours or minutes.”
Bergmann also said he wants the Board of Elections to make vote docking a fair process and consider whether a video uploaded on election day would merit the same amount of docked votes as a video uploaded during the campaign period.
Junior Louis Ortiz, academic affairs senator, said the rules’ annual reevaluation will take away some of the arbitrariness.
“What if [a campaign video] gets more views than ‘Kyle Gets Buckets’?,” Ortiz said, referring to the video of Duke Basketball player Kyle Singler taking trick shots. “[Vote docking] will either invite people to follow the rules or make them say, ‘It’s not bad to get 500 votes and lose 50.’”
The Student Organization Finance Committee bylaw, which was presented and debated at DSG’s meeting last week, also passed and will affect the way organizations’ dues are paid and allows for competitive membership in some chartered organizations.
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