Election Reform

Adam Compton recalls his role in shortening the student government campaign season and the implementation of instant runoff voting.

Interview on 2011-11-28 00:00:00 -0500

Transcript

00:00:00.000 We said this campaign time is too long. Nobody should start campaigning in January for an election in May.
00:00:09.074 This is not the US presidential campaign. We need to shorten this time period.
00:00:13.124 So we made an initial start to campaigning and I think I called the bill "The Reduction in Student Harassment Act"
00:00:21.242 because literally that's what-. The students got so tired of seeing us every day, seeing my yard signs and billboards and everything else out on campus.
00:00:31.151 They were just so tired of it by the end. So we started with a date that you could start campaigning on,
00:00:37.507 and then the other thing we did is, the extra week of campaigning was just too much,
00:00:44.568 having the runoff and everything else, and I guarantee if you look at everybody that's ever ran for student body president, with the exception of maybe one or two-probably Tony Caravano's one of them-
00:00:58.634 their grades have suffered so much that semester-long time they're running for student body president.
00:01:04.274 So that was the other thing; it was a big focus on grades. So we wanted everything to be done in a month.
00:01:10.908 We wanted runoff, everything, done. So we looked at ways to start doing it and one of the things we came up with was instant runoff voting,
00:01:18.243 so we bought a new voting system that allowed us to rank people and we instituted that for the election, I think, after mine,
00:01:27.335 which was another really cool thing that I was able to do.