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
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We said this campaign time is too long. Nobody should start campaigning in January for an election in May.
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This is not the US presidential campaign. We need to shorten this time period.
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So we made an initial start to campaigning and I think I called the bill "The Reduction in Student Harassment Act"
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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.
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They were just so tired of it by the end. So we started with a date that you could start campaigning on,
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and then the other thing we did is, the extra week of campaigning was just too much,
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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-
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their grades have suffered so much that semester-long time they're running for student body president.
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So that was the other thing; it was a big focus on grades. So we wanted everything to be done in a month.
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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,
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so we bought a new voting system that allowed us to rank people and we instituted that for the election, I think, after mine,
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which was another really cool thing that I was able to do.
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