This year’s annual business meeting (Saturday, Aug. 14, 2010) went on for more than four hours, almost entirely due to the time required to count votes, most especially for holding two extra votes for Second Vice President.
There’s an easy solution to this. Well, two solutions:
- Move to an electronic voting method.
- Use preferential voting.
The electronic voting can be done in many different ways, but I would recommend a solution similar to how many states hold elections today, with an optical scan voting system, where the voters fill in a bubble or connect a line on a paper ballot to indicate their preferences. This process is simple, requires no expensive electronics in the voters’ hands, and can be easily audited afterward.
Preferential voting is the key though, and it’s something we already use — for speech contests! Speech contest judges mark their first three choices, and tie-breakers rank all the contestants. We can do the same thing in our elections, especially with electronic vote counting. When a “re-vote” is needed, the computer ballot scanner can do so automatically (and instantaneously), ignoring the dropped candidate. (You could do preferential vote counting by hand, but it would be laborious, having to examine each ballot and skip any dropped candidates for the voter’s next choice.)
With the International Leadership Committee (ILC) from Global Representation and Support bringing us more and more qualified candidates, multiple re-votes will be more and more common. Without these improvements, we’ll face interminable business meetings, waiting for results and then voting yet again on the candidates. Putting these steps in place will also allow the ILC (and RLCs?) to be more comfortable with presenting the voters with three choices to consider, instead of just two.
By simplifying the election process to a single ballot, we might even achieve Parliamentarian Herb Nowlin’s dream of an election with no spoiled or illegal ballots!
To expand upon Mike’s comment regarding Herb’s dream, T. I. apparently does need to do something to simplify the voting. The third ballot for 2nd VP might have been unnecessary at this month’s Int’l Convention IF there hadn’t been 1,000 illegal votes on the 2nd ballot–1,000 ballots showed the name of the candidate for whom they wished to cast their vote, but failed to mark the box beside his name. Therefore, their votes could not be counted, and no candidate received a majority of the vote on the 2nd ballot, making a 3rd ballot necessary.
Dori Drummond, D-8 IPDG
While I think Mike is onto a good idea here, I don’t think eliminating bad ballots would have mattered for that particular election. According to my notes, neither of the two leading contenders on the second round were within 1000 votes of a majority.