"When the people are unhappy with the government, in America they try to change the government; in the Soviet Union, the government tries to change the people." " Old Soviet joke.
At Dartmouth, when the Administration is unhappy with election results, it tries to change the electoral rules.
Having lost the last three trustee elections to anti-Administration candidates, the Wright Administration has now responded to these rebukes.
However, rather than addressing the fundamental reasons why the petition candidates won their elections, a process has been set in motion to change the way the alumni vote for trustees.
The Administration's first step was to look at the detailed results of the trustee elections. This information is available only to President Wright and the Board of Trustees, and not to alumni.
John Walters, president of the Association of Alumni, confirmed to me that the voting results "get sliced and diced various ways ... including by gender, class, etc.", and, I assume, to see how few alumni voters split their votes between the petition and Alumni Council candidates.
Next, a draft Constitution was released last week by the Alumni Council's Task Force on Alumni Governance. Under its provisions, future petition trustees must signal their intention to run for trustee by filing a "Statement of Intent to Petition" 45 days prior to the announcement of the Alumni Council's choice of official candidates (of whom there will be only two in the future, and not three as at present).
In the elections themselves, alumni will vote under a preference system for their First Choice and Second Choice candidates.
What possible purpose can these changes serve, except to make it more difficult for petition trustees to run and win? Regrettably, no justification is offered.
Think about that for a second: this task force proposes to change a many-decades-old constitution, and doesn't deign to explain why.
As Aaron Klein '98 described in The Dartmouth ("Don't Blame the System," May 25), "preference" voting involving ranked choices is a markedly inferior method of holding elections compared to "approval" voting, the present system in which alumni vote for as many candidates as they wish. Unlike preference voting, approval voting doesn't allow candidates and their supporters to game the system with "insincere" voting; it comes closer than any other method to determining voters' real preferences. Klein cited the work of Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow in support of his assertions.
But let's look at how a future election might play out under the proposed Constitution's preference system.
Imagine two establishment candidates for trustee chosen by the Alumni Council (call them AC1 and AC2) facing off against a single petition candidate (PC1). Voters supporting PC1 would be asked to vote for a Second Choice, even if they do not support the candidacies of AC1 and AC2. Their second votes would either go against their interests or be wasted if not used.
However, supporters of the Administration would be able to vote the straight ticket of AC1 or AC2. Under this system, it is likely that their votes would be combined in the election's second round when one of these two candidates is dropped from the rolls.
Tellingly, under this proposed system, Robinson and Zywicki might both have lost the recent election, even though they came close to obtaining absolute majorities; but then only the people with access to the precise election results know that for a fact. As far as I know, the President's office has no plans to release this important information.
Pretty slick on the Administration's part, no? But then this Administration has always played fast and loose when dealing with elections.
Look at the letter, dated August 10, sent to a large number of alumni by Stan Colla, the College's retiring Vice President for Alumni Relations. In it, he clumsily seeks to underplay the extent of Robinson's and Zywicki's victory:
"A total of 15,334 individuals, some 24.3 percent of Dartmouth's total alumni body, cast a total of 35,107 votes under the multiple-voting procedure of the nomination process. Robinson received 7,376 votes (21 percent of the votes cast), and Zywicki received 6,844 (19.5 percent of the votes cast). The other four candidates (Sheila Cheston '80, Greg Engles '79, Rick Lewis '84, Kurt Weiling '71) received 59.5 percent of the votes cast."
By presenting the figures in this way, Colla directs you to react to the fact that Robinson and Zywicki seemingly won the election with only 21 percent and 19.5 percent respectively of the multiple votes that the alumni cast.
But if Colla had depicted the numbers fairly, he would have pointed out that 48.1% of the individual alumni voters cast a ballot for Robinson, and 44.6 percent of them voted for Zywicki.
The disingenuousness of Colla's presentation becomes apparent if, for instance, you hypothesize that in the recent election every single individual voter had voted for, say, Robinson, i.e. all 15,334 voting alumni. Would Colla then have reported that Robinson had received only 43.7 percent of the votes cast (15,334 votes out of a total of 35,107), rather than reporting that 100 percent of the voters had chosen Robinson?
The Dartmouth community deserves better than schoolboy manipulation of the numbers and the petulant re-jiggering of election rules. Show some sense of propriety, President Wright. Don't let your Administration change the voting system because it goes against you. Change the way you run the College. That is what alumni voters and students are asking of you.
