Cloyne elections happen every semester! In the fall, we elect for the spring (as well as a Winter Break Coordinator), and in the spring we elect for both summer and fall.
The few exceptions: Board Reps are elected for a full year. And our Facilities Coordinator is hired by a mixed committee of student-members and non-member senior managers (they’re hiring for staff, not a (senior) manager).
Nominations
For in-person elections, you nominate yourself (or others) by writing your (/their) name on posters that are hung up. For digital elections, there will likely be a form asking for your full candidate statement.
Voting process
Per Cloyne’s Bylaws, we’ll use the instant-runoff voting (IRV) system to elect any positions for which three or more candidates are running for a single position. Because there can be up to two Project Coordinator positions elected, we’ll use the single transferable vote (STV) system to elect PC’s.
Speeches
You’ll be asked to give a short (2-3 minute) speech at Council on Sunday, November 10, at 6 pm. Don’t sweat it too much, but some things you can talk about are:
- Why you’re interested in running and would be a good fit
- How you’d approach the role
- Your capacity for next semester
- How you’d center anti-oppression/inclusion/accessibility/coopdemocracy in your work
- How you envision collaboration with other coordinators and members, and
- What you hope to accomplish
You may want to review the position’s job description for Cloyne and the job description for Central, and/or reach out to current coordinators.
Some notes for actually giving speeches:
- We’ll go position by position, starting with the compensated ones
- We’ll vote as a group (heads-down) whether to hold short deliberation sessions after speeches for each position (or just for contested positions)
- If you are running with another person, you still have just 2-3 minutes!
If you can’t make it (it’s really helpful if you can, though), you can ask a friend to read your speech instead, and/or send it out via clones@cloyne.org
Instant-runoff voting
For every position except the Project Coordinator position, we’ll be using instant-runoff voting. Wikipedia describes that process as follows: “If a candidate has more than half of the vote based on first-choices, that candidate wins. If not, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The voters who selected the defeated candidate as a first choice then have their votes added to the totals of their next choice. This process continues until a candidate has more than half of the votes.”
Single transferable vote
For the Project Coordinator position, we’ll be using the simplest method of counting for single transferable vote: elimination transfers. This is essentially like IRV, except more than one candidate can be elected (precisely, two Project Coordinators can be elected). The candidate with the lowest number of votes will be eliminated at each round of counting, and then the votes for these candidates will be redistributed to remaining candidates according to the candidate the voter ranked next. This will continue until two candidates are remaining. As long as the majority of candidates are not for “none-of-the above”, both of these remaining candidates will be elected.
Election requirements
As always for elections, we need quorum for any of these elections to count. Since our maximum capacity is 140 during the academic year, quorum will be 71 members. And then for any individual position election to count, there must not be more “none-of-the-above” votes than other votes.
drafted by Josh Lavine in Spring 2020