Honor Committee Elections

Last week I was meeting with some people as part of the alternative-sanction working group in the Honor Committee where we discuss plans to change the current single sanction system. As we were discussing everything, something came up about the vote in 2016, which we are all very familiar with. To summarize, there was a proposition on the ballot that would force the Committee to start discussing multiple-sanction options. This received 58.9% of the vote but failed to reach the 60% supermajority that is required for votes on the single sanction. I started thinking about this in the context of the Median Voter Theorem and thought about the reasoning for this threshold.

            Before public choice, I would have assumed that it was set at 60% to ensure that the vote was not biased by abstentions. However, abstentions are likely to happen on both sides of the issue, so the median voter result would still hold. In the context of public choice, it would make sense to have this threshold based on the decision making cost and external cost curves. Based on these costs, it is possible that minimizing the total cost curve sets the optimal decision-making rule at 60%. It is unclear what these exact costs are, but the curves would point to the exact percentage of votes that minimizes costs.

            There is also a third option that the threshold is set at 60% for irrational reasons. As less than 1% of all UVA students go through the Honor process, the external costs of this vote are low. Contrarily, the cost of more decision making is high. The multiple sanction option had a lot of support and a lot of time and money were put into its supporting campaign, however they could only secure 58% of the vote. This would suggest that the voting threshold should be lower and closer to 50%. However, we can’t know where that exact threshold is without further researching the exact costs of a vote. Until then, we will continue to work to get over 60% of the student body’s vote.