Weinberg junior Gauri Adarsh and Medill junior John Sisco won the Associated Student Government presidency Saturday after trailing Weinberg sophomore Alan Hu and SESP junior Noah Cohrs for the first three rounds.
A wealth of election data provided to The Daily by ASG shows how their win came about at the polls.
Students ranked candidates by order of preference in a system known as ranked choice voting. A candidate wins if they receive more than 50% of first-choice votes. If no candidate does, the lowest-performing candidate is eliminated, and their voters’ next highest-ranked candidate gets their votes in the next round. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority. Voters could also mark a no-confidence option.
After four rounds, Adarsh and Sisco achieved victory with 52.9% of the vote. For the first three rounds, they trailed Hu and Cohrs by less than one percentage point, but they received a large number of votes following the third-round elimination of McCormick sophomore Nicholas Johnson and SESP junior Nur Yalinbas.
In the fourth and final round, Adarsh and Sisco beat Hu and Cohrs by around 6% — 98 votes out of 2039 cast, though nearly 350 no-confidence and no-response votes had been subtracted by the last round.
One in four students supported only a single candidate. That included a plurality of Johnson and Yalinbas voters as well as Hu and Cohrs voters.
About 17% of voters, on the other hand, ranked all five choices, including the four candidates and the no-confidence option.
If not for the ranked choice system, Hu and Cohrs would have won. They carried considerable momentum in the popular vote, especially once ASG sent out a Friday voting reminder email to students, but other campaigns made up ground as the polls neared closing, cutting Hu and Cohrs’ popular vote lead to just 12 votes.
Hu and Cohrs’ momentum was largely propelled by students from the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, who gave them 63% of the vote in the final round. Adarsh and Sisco gained a large amount of votes from students from the Medill School of Journalism and the School of Communication, who voted for Adarsh and Sisco 73% and 71% of the time, respectively.
Adarsh and Sisco also won with students from the School of Education and Social Policy, with 64% of the vote, and the Bienen School of Music, with 72%. The pair narrowly won the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences with 51%.
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