College Council May-07 Minutes
Election Analysis Part 2: Turnout
Well its 2 AM and I’ve got my introduction written. Just need to get the conclusion done and I can put this BA Thesis (and myself) to bed. But why not unpack another aspect of tonight (or yesterday’s) election. So, fueled by old sushi from Bart Mart, here I go:
Record Setting Year
If you take a look at turnout(scroll down), you’ll see that this year, like the two years previously, set a record for most students voting at 2,755 voters.
One Campus also broke the record for most votes won by an Executive Slate (Outgoing Liaison Hollie Russon Gilman holds the record for most votes won by a Liaison at 1,097 votes). One Campus won by so much that they would’ve just barely lost to all of the other Slates combined votes (629+393+261= 1283). Brian Cody also garnered an enormous 1,728 votes, but I’m not going to really count this considering he was running unopposed.
There may have been some records set by College Council members, although I don’t have accurate records in front of me. Jarrod Wolf’s 241 votes must be getting close to an all time College Council record and Nicholas Rodman’s 191 vote victory blows away last year’s winner’s 99 vote victory by a fourth year (write-in Eve Ewing), and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the all time highest voting getting fourth year (again, pending numbers)
Who Voted?
A quick analysis shows that about 2/3rd of the voters were Undergrads and 1/3rd were Grads. While I don’t have the numbers now, I feel like this is a shift away from previous elections where it was closer to a 1/2 Grad and 1/2 Undergrad split. Of the Graduates that voted, over 1/3rd came from the Humanities and Social Sciences, which probably represents the level of mobilization among those cohorts due to Grad Aid. Support was otherwise pretty mixed, with each division contributing roughly 100-50 votes.
In this year’s College Council elections, there was a clear jump in voting participation. The Class of 2011 surpassed its record breaking Fall Election turnout numbers where over 1/3rd voted, to deliver near 50% participation. Incredible. The Class of 2010, also a high performer in terms of interest (they’ve always has a large number run for CC) had around 40% participation, which is also incredibly high.
But for me, the Cinderella story is the Class of 2009. In last year’s College Council election, only four people ran and each candidate won with around 70 or so votes (Edit from Kati). This year seven people ran and 40% of the class voted, what a shift! This performance, from the previously lackluster 2009 going into their FOURTH YEAR, is truly extraordinary. My own class of 2008 had 23% of students vote, not bad. But clearly nothing compared to the younger three classes that had active College Council races.
This data also clearly settles the question of whether we can have a successful College Council race that is concurrent to the Slate and Liaison races.
Edit:
I’m also going to go out on a limb and say we’re nearing saturation in terms of College voting patterns. I don’t think its realistic to expect more than 50% of any class to vote, and its incredibly unlikely that any outgoing class will vote higher than 25%. This would mean College votes would cap out at, roughly, 2,100 votes. That’s only 200 votes from this election, not a lot of room to grow and it wouldn’t push us over the 3,000 line.
I would say we’re not going to see growth in turnout until Graduate Students start voting in higher numbers (roughly 10% voted in this election). My guess is this wont happen till SG starts getting involved with the many Professional and Divisional Councils. Another way would be for Graduate Council to have competitive, division-wide elections which would be concurrent with these school wide elections. Until this happens, and Graduate Divisions start engaging directly with SG Elections, I doubt we will see turnout climb above 3,000.
/Edit
How They Voted
Using this sites built in hit tracking abilities, I was able to somewhat monitor voting trends. Now keep in mind, I cannot monitor the actually voting site which is hosted on ORCSA’s servers. But most candidates direct voters to sg.uchicago.edu, so I should see turnout.
As I posted via comments, we saw an influx to the website over the period when voting occurred. Traffic spiked on the main site up to nearly 5,000 hits on the 22nd, dropping to 4,000 and then 3,500 over the three days which the election was held (we get roughly 3,000-2,700 on any given weekday). The blog post telling people where to vote saw a similar pattern, spiking to 1,244 then falling to 812 and 523 over the next three days (2,588 page views all together, about 200 votes off). The statements page faired worse, accruing 1,641 page views over the course of the election (914,457, and 270).
This data tells us a couple of things:
- People tend to vote early, so campaigns should have their message well distributed by Tuesday. They also should plan to immediately start getting out the vote, lest their opponent is able to get to voters first.
- Voting drops off quickly. So if you think you can clinch the election by doing a lot on Thursday, think again. This thing was probably already over for the Slate race by then.
- A little over half of voters read the candidates statements, which means these aren’t as big of deal as one might think.
- People don’t really read All Campus emails. We sent one out on Tuesday and it arrived roughly on Wednesday (I get a lot of ‘Out of Office’ replies so this is how I’m able to time arrival). Yet despite the fact that ALL 15,000 students received the email, very few students decided to visit the SG page and vote (although we did see a spike in blog visits by about 50, which was specifically linked to from the email).
All and all it was a very record setting year.
Next: Facebook (maybe)
Written by Scott
