Open Fairness hearing Friday morning will consider possible change to Fairness Chair election outcome

BP Photo by Sabrina Jahan

THOUGHT: Voters considered how to rank candidates in last Tuesday’s Just Community elections in the gym. Races with more than two candidates were tallied according to an “instant runoff” system.

In text messages to Gilad Spitzer, Sam said that had the votes been put through a different system, Gilad would have won a Fairness Co-Chair spot. 

“After the election, we looked at the results and realized it might potentially make more sense if votes were counted as putting someone number one and number two were [tallied as] equal,” wrote Sam. “We looked to see what would happen if we did that and saw that the results changed (you won).”

What followed was a series of Agenda phone calls to the Fairness Chair candidates during which they were told of the uncertainty, along with lengthy meetings among Agenda leaders about how to proceed.

They decided to leave the decision to the Fairness Committee, which will hold a hearing on it Friday morning.

Dean of Students and Agenda adviser Rabbi Ari Schwarzberg told the Boiling Point that while the election results will remain as they stand for now, they might be changed.

“We’re intentionally not saying that we made a decision to uphold it,” Rabbi Schwarzberg said. “The idea is that we’re saying ‘as of now the results stand, but it will be taken to fairness for further review.’ We’re not taking a stand as a committee of saying ‘we’ve made a decision to keep it.’”

The “Instant Runoff” system, first implemented at Shalhevet in 2017, works differently from a simple popular vote.  It’s complicated and can be hard to understand — it was explained at Town Hall that year in a video — and in the case of elections with two winners, even moreso.

Voters rank their choices in order of preference instead of voting for only one candidate, and the candidate with a plurality of votes — say, 35 percent among five candidates — might not end up as the winner.

Instead, the computer program sorts the ballots such that the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and those who voted for the eliminated candidate have their votes distributed among those they chose for second place.

The process continues until one candidate has a majority. In the case of the election for Fairness Co-Chairs, the elimination continued until there were two remaining candidates — Evan and Joseph. 

In an actual runoff — with a second election to choose winners — people would vote for two choices, without ranking them. In Instant Runoff system used this year, how people ranked their choices was part of how the formula came to its conclusion.  

Second-place votes for candidates other than the candidate with the fewest first-place votes did not play a role in this year’s election. Gilad would have been one of the of the winners if they had.

Talia said that is what is now being questioned.

“That in theory sounds great, but in an instant runoff, since you ignore most of the second-place votes, and because in the past when thinking about an election with two winners, we’ve done it so that people have just voted for two winners… there is an argument to be made that it isn’t fair to ignore the vast majority of those second place votes,” Talia said.

“So what ended up happening in the Fairness Election is if you had just counted the first -and second-place votes and added them together and attributed the total to each candidate, there would have been different winners than had we run a regular instant runoff, which we had done in previous years.”

She said that the oversight was not a coding error, but that the system is simply not suitable for electing two winners.

“There isn’t something inherently wrong with the instant runoff — it just needs to be altered in the case of two winners,” she said. “Had we altered it, and there are ways to alter it that could have fitted perfectly that I think would work for next year, but we didn’t consider the alterations.”

In his email to Gilad, Sam Hirschhorn said his formula did not take into account that people who voted were serious about their choices for number 1 and number 2.

“Basically it was just a super-close election and every system has its quirks,” Sam wrote. “It’s unfortunate that you lost and good luck on the rest of your junior year.”

Rabbi Schwarzberg said that the committee would discuss changes to the election process in the future,

The instant runoff system was approved by the entire Agenda Committee in the spring of 2017 on a vote of 5-4. At the time, there were six candidates running for Agenda chair and the system was presented as an alternative to runoff second election.

One of the people who spoke in its favor was Talia Gill, who was then 10th-grade Agenda rep, according to a Boiling Point article at the time.

“‘I don’t think any kids would take a second election,’ said Talia Gill, 10th grade representative to Agenda, who worried that voter turnout for a possible second election would be small.”

Editor’s note: Gilad Spitzer is Web Editor-in-Chief of the Boiling Point.