Stop Wasting Your Votes, Warwick
It’s nearly election season at Warwick, and that can mean only one thing - I get far too excited about the election data and what it can tell us about the voting system. Last year, as part of RAW’s Big Decision coverage, I stood on stage just 20 minutes after we received the results and analysed what had happened through a series of bar graphs.
We’re currently planning this year’s coverage and I’m hoping to change what is displayed in the Duck, but in the meantime I’ve had a look back at one of last year’s races. I’m not going to explain STV or why it is far better than other voting systems - others can do that far better than me - but let’s use the Societies Officer race to highlight one of the key benefits, and the main issue in how it’s applied on campus.
Under first-past-the-post (FPTP), where the aim is simply to get the highest number of votes, Nikita would have won this election.
This would have represented just over 28% of the votes cast in the election - awful by STV standards and even by FPTP - only 4 MPs in British history have ever had lower winning shares of the vote.
Therefore, we use STV, where each voter ranks the candidates, and in each round of counting if no candidate has 50%+1 of the votes we eliminate the one with the fewest and redistribute their votes according to the voters’ preferences. Under this system, Luke received more second (and third etc.) preferences from Sophie, Jack, Shailja and RON’s voters than Nikita, such that he had more votes than Nikita in the final round of voting, securing more than 50% and giving us the ideal representative result. A majority of the voters preferred Luke to Nikita, and democracy is upheld.
Right?
Wrong.
The first 34% of voters preferred Luke to Nikita.
The next 33% of voters preferred Nikita to Luke.
The final 33% were indifferent between the two.
It begs one question:
What happened?
STV did exactly what it was supposed to. Each vote for eliminated candidates was reallocated according to the preferences voters put on their ballots. The problem is, in at least 33% of cases, voters didn’t fill out their ballot entirely. At some point, they chose “No Further Preferences” before they had ranked all of the candidates - indifference. When all of their chosen candidates had been eliminated, STV had no choice but to mark the ballot as a “Non-Transferable Difference” (NTD), casting the ballot out and reducing the number of votes required to win the election.
Have a look at this Sankey diagram and you’ll see what I mean.
Overwhelmingly, votes for the eliminated candidates were not transferred, meaning the small flows of votes to Luke and Nikita mattered more. This isn’t to say that one vote counted more than another, but if these wasted votes were a candidate, they’d have come third to Nikita by only 30 votes, who in turn came second to Luke by only 39 votes. If these voters expressed a preference for either candidate, it’s possible we wouldn’t have seen such a close election.
Did someone say close election? Let’s have a look at last year’s presidential race.
This election is objectively better, since a smaller proportion of the votes are wasted, but this is largely the result of more votes being cast for the top two candidates. The votes for each eliminated candidate were still overwhelmingly non-transferable, with Ben’s victory the result of a minority of Josh’s voters preferring him over Larissa.
These were just the two most contested elections last year, but they highlight an issue lacking coverage in the past decade of SU elections - while the focus might be on turnout figures and making sure as many students as possible cast votes, the benefits of STV are eradicated if those students decide not to rank all of the candidates.
This isn’t a fault with STV, it’s a fault with the voters - but it doesn’t necessarily need to be fixed. Expressing indifference is a valid opinion, but prospective sabbs still need to focus on getting people involved more.
