Rank Choice Voting

In the Spring of 2019, members of the Haverford School community reflected creatively about how to make the voting institutions at our school more representative of the identity of our student body and in the course of the debate began to consider the democratic process of Rank Choice Voting. Rank Choice Voting ensures that the elected student officials would be the most "preferred" as opposed to the most "popular" choice of their peers. What this means is that any student elected to office would have obtain not only the most raw votes, but the most votes over the rest of the field. In a single candidate election, this would mean that the winning candidate would have to achieve over 50% of the vote, rather than win with perhaps 37% which might be the most of any candidate, but still reflects the fact that 63% of the voting body did not vote for that candidate. This is achieved by rather than having a voter cast 1 vote for his choice of the candidate, the voter would simply rank the candidates in the voter's preferred order. As candidates with the lowest tally of votes were eliminated, those votes would be reallocated to the 2nd choice candidate, 3rd choice candidate and so on until one of the candidates reached above that 50% threshold.

To learn more about Rank Choice Voting, check out this excellent short video by my college and Government teacher, Mr. Tim Lengel.

I am proud to have taken a lead in this effort, first, in being a strong advocate of the process and helping to educate students, teachers and administration about both its procedural and philosophical merits and challenges. Second, I was an organizing influence in actually making the implementation happen. When it was put to me what the mathematics behind the process would look like, I began collaborating with Alexander Greer (class of 2020) about creating the voting system. While Alexander was writing the computer program that would process the votes, I enjoyed testing and troubleshooting the program with Ms. Katharine Hudson and designing the ballot and organizing the student voting experience with Mr. Mark Fifer. In my opinion the initiative turned out to be a resounding success. I understand that many students felt like their voice was more democratically impactful and I am looking forward to seeing our student leaders in action in the 2019/2020 school year.