I’ve just returned from a luxurious one week holiday…in London! The President was kind enough to grant me leave and I came back to the Guild today in a flurry of optimism and excitement for all the events coming up in the second half of this term. I thought I’d blog to update you all on the NUS Delegate Election results.
From February 1st to February 3rd, over 700 students voted in our NUS Delegate Elections. The winning candidates were Ed Sparkes, Emma Packham, Mark Harrop, Callum Anderson, Gideon Mendell, Alexander Zatman and Abigail Goodman. They will attend NUS Annual Conference alongside the Guild of Students’ President Fabian Neuner. In addition Claire Lister was elected Disabled Students’ Officer and Jahamal Rowe was elected Home Students’ Officer. Congratulations to all successful candidates.
As you may have read in Redbrick, the announcement of the results was delayed by twenty-three hours. The cause of delay in the announcement of the NUS Delegate Results was due to the complex calculations that are required to determine the winner in an election like the NUS Delegate Election, where multiple positions are available. It was felt necessary to double check these calculations through conducting an exploratory paper count of Rounds One and Two. This exploratory paper count confirmed the original e-count. There was never any problem with the voting system and the measures taken were simply precautions.
A fuller explanation follows, but I’m afraid that to fully explain what happened we have to include technical details about the STV process that the Guild of Students uses. If you need more information or have any questions about this, please email elections@guild.bham.ac.uk.
The Guild of Students uses the Electoral Reform Society STV 1997 set of rules. Under these rules, in the case of multiple-position elections candidates are successfully elected once they have reached quota. This quota is the Number of Votes divided by the Number of Positions Available + 1. Should a candidate be elected with votes in addition to what they needed to meet quota, then these surplus votes will be redistributed to other candidates via a process called ‘fractional transfer’. This is where a candidate’s surplus votes are used to reflect the breakdown of the second preferences cast by their voters. This is done by dividing the surplus votes by the total number of transferable votes, with a transferable vote being a vote with a next preference for a candidate still in the election. This division would then set the transfer value for all votes that were transferring. So for example if Candidate A had exceeded quota by a surplus of ten and had fifty votes with next available preferences, then you would divide ten by fifty which would give the fifty transferring votes a transfer value of 0.2.
However in some cases (for example when a large number of a candidate’s first preference votes have no available next preference) the number of transferable votes is less than the surplus by which they have exceeded quota. In such a case, the transferable votes are transferred at their present value and the remainder is non-transferable. So for example if Candidate B had exceeded quota by fifty but only had ten votes with a next available preference then the ten transferable votes would be transferred to the remaining candidates and forty votes would be non-transferable.
In this election, due to the large number of first preference votes for candidate Ed Sparkes that had no next available preference (that is votes that had a preference for a candidate other than Emma Packham or Mark Harrop) it was this second process that was followed. This is very unusual, and the Returning Officer and the Chair of Elections Committee both took the view that it was important to check that this was correct by conducting an exploratory paper count. Having counted all ballots and conducted the transfer of votes from Ed Sparkes to the remaining candidates in the election we are now fully satisfied that the original e-count and its simulation of the STV calculations was correct.
