Voting in the Elections

How does voting work?

Voting takes place online at the Union of Students website. Students login to the Union website and navigate to the voting page. They can then vote for their preferred candidates using the Single Transferable Vote system. They don't have to vote for all positions but they do have the option of coming back to vote for more positions, if they wish to, at any time and as many times throughout the voting period as they like.

Who is RON?

If voters don't want any of the candidates available to be elected, there is an option for Re-Opening Nominations (R.O.N). If R.O.N wins the most votes for a position, then no candidate is elected for that role and the position will re-open again in our next election.

What is the Single Transferable Vote?

With this system of voting a voter can rank the list of candidates in order of preference (marking a '1' beside the most preferred candidate, a '2' beside the second-most preferred candidate and so on). The voter may rank any number of candidates they wish. For example, if there are five candidates running; they can rank one of the five candidates, two of the five, three of the five, four of the five, or all five of the candidates. This means they do not have to rank all candidates unless they choose to.

When the results are calculated all voters' first preferences are counted and if a candidate has more than 50% of the ballot they are considered the winner. If no candidate has above 50% then the candidate with the lowest score is excluded and the count is redone using the second preference (if there was one) for every voter who put the excluded candidate down as first preference. This exclusion and recounting is then repeated until a candidate has the necessary number of votes to win.

The purpose of this voting system is to allow the voter to make a choice based on actual preference rather than encouraging tactical voting. Even if their primary choice for the role may not have enough of a following to win outright they can still vote for them without their vote being wasted (if they do not win and are excluded the voter's second choice will then be used instead).

Here is an example of how an election using the STV could turn out:

As we can see, in the first round: Candidate 1 has 48%, Candidate 2 has 33% and R.O.N has 19% of (first preference) votes.

Because no candidates received over 50% of the vote, the candidate with the lowest votes (R.O.N) is eliminated from the contest and their votes are then shared out amongst the remaining candidates in round two, if they have another preference marked down.

So in this example, all of R.O.N's votes had a second preference vote for Candidate 2, which pushed Candidate 2 over the 50% threshold in round two, to win the election (even though they were behind in round one).