USG constitution unclear on voting for budget referendum

The referendum vote was administered using a system known as Single Transferable Voting (STV), which can produce a sort of instant runoff if no majority is reached.

In STV, voters rank the available choices in order of preference. Students who rank as their first choice the option that receives the fewest first-choice votes then have their votes reallocated to their second-choice selections.

On the social budget reallocation referendum, 2,414 students voted, and 1,008 ranked donating the money to the Pace Center as their first choice, which is 41.8 percent of the vote — not a majority.

STV gave the referendum its majority by taking the second choices of those students who voted to allocate the money to Annual Giving and redistributing those votes to either donating the money to the Pace Center or not donating the funds at all.

Under this formulation, the student-initiated-projects option accumulated 1,387 votes, which represents a 57.8 percent majority, while the option of not donating the funds at all received 1,011 votes after the reallocation.

The USG constitution’s rules governing referenda state that “the Senate shall be bound by the result of the referendum if at least one-sixth of regularly-enrolled undergraduates vote in the majority,” with no mention of runoffs or STV. This omission leaves it unclear whether it is permissible for referenda votes to be held via STV.

The constitution explicitly calls for the use of STV voting in elections for U-Councilors and class senators. The constitution also makes specific provisions for when runoffs are permissible: during the elections of executive and class government officers when no candidate receives a majority of the vote.

The referendum on donating funds from the Senate Pilot Projects, on the other hand, received a majority even before the STV method was implemented.

The confusion has arisen because it is unclear whether it was constitutional to redistribute the second-choice votes and essentially hold an instant runoff when the constitution does not state that runoffs are permissible for referenda. Since the Constitution does not mention STV or runoffs in the section governing referenda, it is not clear whether a simple majority — which the social budget reallocation referenda did not receive before STV was used — is required to pass a referendum.

But STV has been used for many USG elections, senior elections manager Sophie Jin ’11 said.

“The STV system has been used for every election governed by the election rules, and its constitutionality has never been in question,” said Jin, who is also a photographer for The Daily Princetonian.

Diemand-Yauman said in an e-mail that he believed the elections managers made the “correct decision.”

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“The [STV] system is the most democratic way to tally preferentially-ranked votes,” he said.

Jin said the elections packet “govern[s] the voting for referendums, and … specifies that all voting is based on the STV system.”

Section 7.1 of the elections packet states that “the voting format will be based on the system of Single Transferable Voting.” The format, however, was not used for all elections this spring.

The Class of 2012 vice-presidential race, which had five candidates, did not use STV because the constitution explicitly states that “if there are three or more candidates who run for one Executive Officer or class officer position and if no candidate succeeds in obtaining a majority, the top two candidates will face each other in a run-off.” This is the only mention of a runoff in the constitution.

This is not the first time that the use of STV has confused voters in USG elections. In last year’s U-Council elections, candidates were upset about changes to the STV system that allowed voters to select only two preferred candidates rather than three. The year before, the U-Council elections violated the terms of the USG constitution when students were allowed to rank 10 candidates.