Ranked Choice Voting in Wellesley College Government Elections
Do you want more representation and your full preferences to be taken into consideration when you are voting for your Wellesley College Government Cabinet officers? Please sign the petition here to support a ballot measure for Wellesley College Government to consider implementing ranked choice voting in Cabinet elections!
The current voting system for contested elections for Cabinet positions, ranging from CG President to Student Bursar, are based on a winner-takes-all (plurality) system. This creates gaps in representation, as candidates could win office without securing even 51% of the votes, which calls into question whether such candidates truly reflect constituent preferences.
To address these issues, I am proposing that CG implement ranked choice voting and instant runoffs for the annual Cabinet elections. This means that voters can rank candidates in preferential order. If there is no majority winner, the candidate with the least first place votes is removed, and the votes are redistributed. The process continues until there is a majority winner.
We have already seen this system implemented in New York City, Maine, Alaska, Cambridge, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, and many other areas of the United States! The benefits of ranked choice voting are plentiful, including candidates having to interact with more constituents in order to win and eliminating the spoiler effect of losing candidates.
