Winter 2010 ASUCD Election

*Winners

Links:

• Winter 2010 Stove Top Report¹
• Winter 2010 Round by Round Results
• Senate Ballot Data
• Pres/VP Ballot Data

¹Note: The Stove Top Report includes the JAM slate among the independents. If you treat them as a seperate slate you get the following information:

• LEAD gained 49.5% of first round votes and 50.0% of the Senate seats.
• JAM gained 24.3% of first round votes and 33.3% of the Senate seats.
• Independents gained 26.2% of the first round votes and 16.7% of the Senate seats.

This breakdown is very similar to the previous election (Fall 2009). And just like that election, you'll notice the discrepancy between JAM and the Independents. The JAM voters are overrepresented and the Independent voters are underrepresented. This is a result of the number of seats up for election. The more seats open, the more representative the outcome will be with Choice Voting. An election with only one open seat could result in 49.9% of the voters not represented. An election with two open seats could result in just under 1/3 of the voters not represented. And that number gets smaller with the more seats open in a Choice Voting election.

In this particular election, if there were 7 seats open you would expect an Independent to gain that seat, and in fact that is exactly what happens when you run the data. Raj Kumar is elected in that scenario, giving the JAM and Independent voters equal representation to go with their almost equal vote totals. (Though, in the process LEAD goes from almost perfect representation to under-represented.) Additionally, if Raj Kumar had just 19 more votes in the final round of the actual election, he would have been elected instead of Selisa Romero and the JAM/Independent representation discrepancy would have been flipped.

It is fair to point out that voters do not always vote based on party/slate line but enough of them do that these groupings tend to work towards predicting outcomes, as I did above. There also seems to be an "Independent" voting bloc in ASUCD elections, despite the fact that these candidates are usually not running together and may in fact be complete opposites from one another. Nevertheless, an eliminated Independent candidate will usually transfer most of their votes to another Independent candidate.

²Note: The following information is not provided in any of the linked reports and contains some interesting information on the preferences of voters with respect to the Executive tickets.

• 718 ranked no second choice
• 419 ranked Gregg Webb and Daniele Martin second
• 310 ranked Sergio Blanco and Vishakha Patel second

• 623 ranked no second choice
• 410 ranked Gregg Webb and Daniele Martin second
• 303 ranked Jack Zwald and Previn Witana second

• 231 ranked Jack Zwald and Previn Witana second
• 225 ranked Sergio Blanco and Vishakha Patel second
• 213 ranked no second choice