Due to the nature of the voting mechanism used in Dartmouth trustee elections and the perceived existence of two distinct slates of different sizes, the election of a trustee candidate nominated by the Alumni Council is contingent on a large voter turnout, scholars of election methods said.
As of May 13, 17 percent of eligible alumni had voted online, according to voxthevote.org.
The winner of the trustee election, which will end on Tuesday, is selected using the approval voting method. In approval voting, alumni vote for all of the candidates they support, instead of voting for one candidate as occurs in traditional plurality voting.
"With approval voting you have a number of candidates running with only one to be chosen and the system says that people can vote for as many candidates as they like," said Robert Norman, a professor emeritus in the departments of math and math and social sciences. "You can vote for as many candidates as you want to support, which means that the person who gets the most votes is the person who had the most people interested in supporting [him or her]."
With plurality voting, saying "yes" to one candidate means voting "no" to the others. This is not the case in the approval system.
These concepts have been underscored by Steven Brams, a preeminent scholar in election methods and professor of politics at New York University.
As Brams wrote in a 2003 working paper, approval voting gives voters more options, helping them to elect the strongest candidate. It also limits negative campaigning, increases voter turnout and raises the influence of minority candidates.
Approval voting has gained popularity over the past few decades among corporations and not-for-profit organizations. Both the American Mathematical Society and the Sierra Club rely on this method for the election of their officers.
A prominent use of the system, however, is in the United Nations. The secretary general of the UN is elected through approval voting. Several U.S. state governments, including the Vermont legislature, have considered approval voting, but none has implemented it.
Plurality voting is still popular, especially in politics, Norman said.
"It is very easy and it has been a tradition for a very long time, but there is more and more dissatisfaction with it as a result of some relatively close elections where people felt they had to vote for somebody they didn't like as well but may have had a better chance of winning," he said.
The use of the approval voting method, coupled with the fact that the candidates in the trustee election are separated into one slate nominated by the Alumni Council and another by petition, has several implications for the outcome of the election.
"It is not just a matter of choosing the best candidate, but choosing the best candidate with the right label," Norman said. "That really changes an election quite considerably."
It is almost impossible for the Alumni Council nominating committee to bring forth a slate of candidates and not have a petition candidate come forward in response.
"In the case of the nominating committee, their intention is to find the candidate who has the particular views toward the institution that the petition candidates want to have," Norman said. "No matter how successful they are in finding one, the candidate does not carry the petition label and then a lot of the voting seems to be for the label and not the candidate."
Attempts at creating an inclusive slate by nominating candidates who appeal to both petition and non-petition factions of the alumni body may therefore be unsuccessful as the candidates are not identified with the petition label. As a result, the existence of a petition slate is theoretically assured.
The presence of two slates also affects the dynamic between the majority and minority factions within the alumni population.
"It is almost always the case that a dedicated, substantial minority can win an election against a somewhat relaxed majority -- the minority, by working hard and getting all of their people out, can win," Norman said. "If indeed the data are as people have suggested, that the majority of the alumni really go along with the less-conservative members of the nominating committee's slate, then the only reason [the less-conservative candidate] wouldn't get elected is if they don't come out to vote."
The "less conservative" non-petition candidates of the Alumni Council's slate will only win if voter turnout is high.
"No matter what system you are using, getting people who care to care enough to come out and vote is sacred," Norman said. "In order for people in a majority to win, they have to care enough to act, and if they don't care enough to act, people who have a strong gripe are going to win."
