Elections

Each ratified student group must elect a new committee every 12 months. This is done as part of the re-ratification process and full information can be found on the Re-ratification pages.

You may also find yourself mid-way through the year with a vacant position on your committee, if a committee member has stepped down or resigned. If this is the case, you need to hold an EGM to fill the committee positions.

Project Constitution [10.7] - If any vacancies occur in the committee during the academic year, they shall be democratically filled through an EGM as soon as possible.

Holding an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM)

You can host elections in various ways, such as a hustings-style event in person, or hosting this virtually. However you choose to host, you need to make sure it is advertised 7 days in advance and open to all members.

Appoint your Returning Officer

The first thing to do is decide who your Returning Officer will be. Typically this is the Project Coordinator, but they must be impartial so if they are running for a position they cannot take on the role of returning officer. The Returning Officer cannot vote in the election. The Returning Officer decides the rules of the election and how it will be organised.

Options for Running Your Elections

There are various options for how you actually go about holding your elections, you can host them in-person or virtually, or go for a blended option:

• In Person Hustings / Live Zoom Call
  If you’d like to run your elections in person or over a call, we’d first recommend using the First Past the Post voting system, which is outlined below, as it’s much easier to calculate in real-time. You can invite nominees to give a short speech about why they’d be good for the role. They could take questions from members, and then voting could open.
  Once the votes are tallied you can announce the winners live on the call and then move on to the next position. This enables people who have been unsuccessful in running for one position to re-run for a different one later on.
  If you’re running your EGM through Zoom and you don’t have a physical box where attendees can place their ballot into, you can run the voting through a google form, or through a programme like Socrative, which you can access for free using your .ac.uk email address and means you can update and add questions in real time.

• Online Form
  If you don’t want to host a big call or in person meeting, you could ask individuals to submit ‘manifestos’ (just a short statement about why they’d be suited to the role) to the project email address by a certain date. Then you could upload these to a Google form or similar programme for people to read through and vote on. You could use either First Past the Post or Single Transferable Vote systems for an election in this way. The key thing here is to ensure that the timelines for nominating and voting are clearly communicated to all members, and that the voting form is left open for long enough for members to engage with it.

• Blended Option
  You could go for the option of having a hustings event in person or on a Zoom call where nominees made speeches and took questions, and then open a voting form afterwards for people to make their choices.

No matter which choice you go with, ensure that the rules for elections are followed - you must advertise the elections at least 7 days in advance; quorum should be reached (25% of project volunteers or 5 project volunteers, whichever is greater); only members of the project can vote; and you must have Re-Open Nominations as a candidate. Candidates can campaign for their role if they wish, for example through social media. However, the current committee should not contact project members to endorse individuals or suggest who they would vote for, to keep the election as fair as possible.

Choose Your Voting System

Project can use two different voting systems: First Past the Post (FPTP), and Single Transferable Vote (STV). The choice of system you use could influence the outcome of your elections, and there are pros and cons to each. For example, STV is more representative of your membership’s preferences, but it can be incredibly complicated to manage manually.

First Past the Post

When using FPTP, your electorate casts one vote for their favourite candidate. The votes are then counted, and the candidate with the highest number of votes is the winner.

For example, you might have four candidates for one position: A, B, C, and Re-Open Nominations (“RON”). The voting tallies might be:

Candidate A - 10 votes

Candidate B - 13 votes

Candidate C - 7 votes

RON - 2 votes

In this election, Candidate B is the winner with the highest number of votes. This is a really straightforward calculation. However, it’s arguably not representative of the electorate, as more people voted for candidates who weren’t B than those who did. If this position was to be held by two people, Candidates A and B would both be elected.

First Past the Post is the most straightforward voting system, and is easy to calculate. You could use a simple Google form or similar programme to cast and count votes.

Single Transferable Vote

When using STV, your electorate ranks the available candidates in their order of preference (though they aren’t required to rank all the candidates). To count the votes, you first calculate a ‘quota’ that candidates must reach in order to win using the following formula:

Quota = (Total Votes / Total Seats + 1) +1

For example, say you had 32 voters in your election, and only 1 person could hold the available position. You’d need to calculate the total votes (32) divided by the total number of seats plus one (2) - this makes 16 - and then add 1. That would make 17 your quota. Alternatively, if two people could hold the position, your quota would be 12 (323 = 10.66, which you’d round up to 11, plus 1). Two candidates would need to reach this number to be elected.

Once your quota is calculated, you add up all the candidates’ first-choice votes. If the right number of candidates reach the quota in the first round, they’ve won the election. If nobody reaches the quota, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the second-choice preferences of those who voted for them are then allocated to the remaining candidates. This process goes on until a candidate reaches the quota.

If you’re electing multiple seats, this system gets much more complicated. It requires assigning new values to surplus ballots and transferring these proportionally among the different candidates. This ensures that voters’ opinions are consistently represented, but is extremely difficult to calculate manually. You can find out more information and examples of using STV here.

It’s possible to count STV manually using a Google form or similar programme. However it can take a long time and a lot of effort. There are websites you can use which will calculate this for you, such as this transferable vote counter.

Struggling to recruit a committee?

If you’ve held your EGM and you haven’t managed to fill your committee positions, or are struggling to gain interest from students to run your project for the next academic year. Get in touch with us and we can support you and discuss next steps.

Jasmine Pledger, Student Citizenship and Employability Development Coordinator - j.pledger@yusu.org