First Year President Elections

In our democratic society, elections are a go-to method to appoint people to a variety of offices. Each spring, UVA holds university wide elections to determine who should represent the student body in dozens of classes and councils. Upon examination of election results and statistics, I have discovered several UVA applications of election public choice.

By having students rank their choices, the University Board of Elections is able to enact what appears to be a Hare system, where the candidate ranked highest by the fewest number of voters is removed from the list (Mueller chapter 7 "Simple Alternatives to Majority Rule"). The First Year President election results demonstrate this best because it had the greatest number of candidates.

In college elections, campaign spending (in chalk and fliers) is devoted almost entirely to name recognition. Candidates are usually all challengers, and are acting in the increasing returns portion of the campaign spending S curve (Mueller 483).

Probably many of the votes go to the candidate with the best name recognition or the candidate listed first. I've voted in some of these elections and noted that the candidates are listed alphabetically by first name. It would be interesting to do more research to determine whether early names are disproportionately represented in some offices.

Even if students are willing to vote through the low-cost online system, rational ignorance is prevalent.The Outcome Differential is very low, even if the probability of casting a deciding vote is high, relative to a bigger election. The choice to vote is going to be dependent on opportunity cost and social pressure. Both these indicate that Grad students would have low voter turn outs, and the fact that grad student turn out is about 60% lower than undergrad seems to reflect this.