RCV>Approval: A Sorority Girl's Op Ed

     Within my sorority Pi Beta Phi, I serve as one of 6 members on our Leadership and Nominating Committee (LNC). LNC’s role is to interview and slate members we believe should be on the executive team for the next year-long term. We submit our picks to the current executive branch, and they approve or deny our picks. The general population within the sorority currently has no say in who gets elected since the LNC is picked by Nationals. 

    I wonder though, how did Pi Phi decide on this voting method? When analyzing how I came to be on LNC today during the 4 hours of interviews I endured, I thought a lot about public choice and our current voting method/whether or not I think it is effective. What I realized was that, I do not think the way we vote is effective in producing Condorcet winners. 

    Connecting this to class briefly, I noticed that LNC elects their picks through the approval voting method - touched on in Mueller as an alternative to simple majority. Essentially, this just seems like a popularity contest. We pick everyone we like for that position, and the person we like the most (gets the most “approval” votes) wins. 

Now, thinking about this, I don’t love the way this sounds, and it didn’t seem like it would produce many Condorcet winners for each position as it would be statistically a low probability that the entirety of the chapter’s values align with the 6 members on LNC for every pick we make. For this reason, it seems to me the way we vote ought to change. An alternative I think would be effective in creating more Condorcet winners would be ranked choice voting, and opening it up to the entire sorority. Ranked choice voting has many pros, including the fact that it decreases the cost of voting by eliminating the need to return to the polls (the Pi Beta Phi chapter room) multiple times. It also allows for there to be multiple candidates for each position. Additionally, in a group of 160, the benefits of voting are drastically increased since your vote actually matters - making it rational to vote and likely meaning there would be high voter turnout - demonstrating its potential as a solid alternative to the approval voting method we now use through the LNC.