Dear Yearbook Club,
At some point in elementary school, students start being taught the dangerous lie that in order to decide something fairly, all you have to do is vote. The classic head-down-hands-up has become a decision-making strategy that is synonymous with fairness and student representation. If only we lived in a world where things were that easy.
A crash course on voting systems: there are a lot more ways than one to run a vote. The most common system is called “first past the post.” Each person gets one vote, and the option with the most votes wins. This system disenfranchises people with unpopular opinions, creating a dilemma that has most Republicans squirming; as much as they hate Trump, if they vote for a third-party conservative and said candidate doesn’t receive a plurality (more votes than any other category), then their vote is essentially forgotten, and the effect is that they don’t really get a vote at all. History shows that vote-splitting, where multiple candidates run with very similar platforms, almost certainly guarantees the loss of said candidates, even if the majority of citizens would prefer either of them over the alternative. This encourages bipartisan politics and polarization, which is good for the reigning political parties (they don’t have to worry about the Green Party or the Libertarians or the Neonazis or anything like that) but terrible for the American people. Additionally, if a candidate is eliminated (let’s say Clinton dies of pneumonia before the election), everyone who cast an early ballot essentially loses their vote.
Thankfully, there’s a way better system. It’s called single transferable vote, and it allows people to rank their options in order of preference. If you vote for a candidate who doesn’t get a majority, your vote is transferred to your second-favorite choice, and so on and so forth until a candidate has a majority of votes. This is all very easy to automate digitally, and is used in many countries such as Northern Ireland, India, and New Zealand. In this system, people with views not aligning with major political parties aren’t disenfranchised, and people won’t have to worry about voting for a candidate they’re unhappy with simply because not doing so is a vote for someone worse.
This brings us to Senior Superlatives and the voting procedure created by your club. Your first major error was failing to remember the right to abstention, or your right to not vote. In order to nominate someone for a superlative or to vote for someone already nominated, you had to vote in every single category. That would be like if in order to vote for president, you also had to choose between Jermaine Bagnall-Graham and James L. Seward for New York State Senate. Don’t know who either of those guys are? Then maybe you see my point. The result is that categories people are not interested in will result in random selection and even more of a popularity contest than the vote already is.
Worse still, your voting system used first past the post, which meant that I voted for some people simply because I didn’t want their opponents to win the superlative, even if I liked the third option better.
Then, to further degrade my ability to have my voice heard, you decided to remove candidates running for multiple positions based on their initial nomination survey. The result was that the most popular candidates were not available for positions in which people would like to see them. For instance, James Yoon ’17 might have been both the most likely to be president and best dressed, but people might have prefered him in one position over the other, and because of your voting procedure, people weren’t able to get that choice.
You decided to choose the candidates in each category based on an original survey in which people were asked to nominate someone by writing them in for each position—remember, they were forced to write something in every category, which is guaranteed to lead to people voting for things they don’t want or don’t care about. The results of this survey, while necessary to choose initial candidates, should not have been used to cut people out of categories in which they were popular. The entire point of nominations is for people to be inspired by candidates they didn’t think of. For instance, I personally didn’t think of Yoon for best dressed, but when I saw he was nominated, I realize he was a very qualified candidate because his clothing choice is so good that you don’t necessarily notice it (he just looks very professional and put together). At the very least, the fact that some candidates on the final list got as few as two nominations to push off popular candidates should give you an idea of just how worthless the results of the nomination survey were in determining rank.
Worse still, even with this final voting procedure, which was specifically designed to prevent people from winning multiple offices, you still managed to have repeats on this list—Sophie Clavel ’17, Sophie Partington ’17, Kristen Reid ’17, and Annika Browning ’17 were all under two categories each.
All of this meant that my voice regarding superlative qualifications was no longer able to be heard, which made me feel disenfranchised just as it should make all seniors feel disenfranchised.
The solution to all of this is incredibly simple. Use a single transferable vote using the candidates nominated, and don’t arbitrarily remove people who are popular in multiple categories. People would rank whom they preferred, in order of preference for each category, so that voting for an unpopular candidate wouldn’t strip you of your vote. If a candidate won multiple positions, then give them the position in which they won the largest percentage of votes and transfer their votes in any other categories they were in the running for to whomever their supporters ranked as their second choice. And of course, don’t force everyone to vote in every category! If no one is interested in voting for a category, maybe you guys should come up with some better superlatives.
Yearbook Club is clearly an organization resistant to change (even in 2016, you refuse to sell digital copies of the book, which would save students thousands of dollars in net spending), but when it comes to ensuring that democracy is done fairly, there can be no excuses.
Warm regards,
Jacob Silcoff