This post contains all information regarding the Student Council elections for class representatives in the 2017-2018 academic year. Elections will be happening next Thursday in advisory.

Candidate List

The nominations and vetting process has been concluded and the list of candidates have been listed below. Note to all candidates: you should prepare a one-minute speech to deliver to their classmates during this advisory before the voting.

Voting System

This year a change has been introduced to the voting system to ensure that elected representatives are chosen as democratically as possible. To improve the system, elections will be changed to ranked choice voting. 

How does ranked choice voting work? Instead of voting for just one candidate, you will be ranking all the candidates according to your preference. You should select your most preferred candidate as your first choice, your second preferred candidate as your second choice, etc. We will then count all the first choice votes. If a candidate has 1) the most votes and 2) at least 50% of the vote, he or she will win the election. However, if the candidate has the most votes but has not reached at least 50% of the total number of votes casted, we will eliminate all the first choice votes on ballots cast for the candidate who has the least votes. We will then count the second choice votes on these ballots and add them to the totals. This process will be repeated until a candidate reaches 50% of the vote.

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario. Imagine if candidate A, B and C run in an election. You want candidate B to win, would be fine with candidate A but really does not want candidate C to win. You would mark your ballot along these lines:

It turns out that the results of the vote would come out as follows:

• Candidate A: 45%
• Candidate B: 25 %
• Candidate C: 30%

Candidate A has ‘won’, but he cannot possibly claim to be the choice of his class, because he could not claim that at least half his class has voted for him. Under this system, we will then re-count the votes by eliminating all the ballots that were casted for Candidate B, who won the least amount of votes, and counting their second choices. In our case, we had voted for Candidate B as our first choice; this would be eliminated and our vote will instead go to Candidate A, who was our 2nd choice.

Now imagine that the result would then turn out as:

• Candidate A: 45%
• Candidate C: 55%

It turns out that candidate C was actually the more popular choice! Therefore, candidate C has won the election.

Good luck to all candidates running, and happy voting! If you have any questions about the elections, please email Ken at stmathis@edu.kis.ac.th.