Letter to the Editor

Sally, Rob and Tom are three freshmen running for the last remaining position on the DSG Free T-Shirts Committee. While Sally and Tom regularly post in the class Facebook page, Rob lives in a third floor single, and honestly no one really knows who he is. Both Sally and Tom campaign heavily in the week leading up to the day of the election. When the big day finally arrives, all of Sally’s friends rank Sally first and Tom last, while all of Tom’s friends rank Tom first and Sally last. The race is close, and the winner…

… Is Rob.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem famously argues that the result of an election contested between more than two candidates where the winner is determined by aggregating the individually ranked preferences of all voters is never ideal. To put it simply, by ranking second on everyone’s ballot, Rob ended up winning despite not being anyone’s first choice.

In the actual freshman DSG elections this past Friday, students had to rank ALL the candidates before they could submit their online ballots. Consequently, after voting for their top choices, the entire class was faced with a perplexing dilemma: how best to blindly rank individuals whom they had never met before. Perhaps some decided to give up rather than attempt to fill out the entire ballot. Perhaps others decided to just rank the remaining candidates first to last from top to bottom to save time. Who knows? But either way, the results of the election would have been significantly distorted.

Certainly no system is perfect. Arrow’s theorem says as much. But while the lack of voter turnout in DSG elections has been the subject of much scrutiny, the ballot itself has been overlooked despite arguably being even bigger problem. After all, what good is an increase in voter turnout if the preferences of those who do vote aren’t accurately represented?

Rohith Kuditipudi

T ‘19