The dust has settled on the 2017 UWA Student Guild Election, and it was one for the record books. And thanks to yours truly, Antonate Slivergreen, the most covered, numerically, that is.
There was a record level of candidates participation, with 311 Ordinary Guild Councillor (OGC) candidates alone. This year marked STAR’s 6th election win in a row, and 23rd overall. As Christopher Pyne would say, they are “an election winning machine”. There are, however, some silver linings for LAUNCH who improved their primary vote, got a significant number of Ordinary Guild Councillors (OGC) elected and saw STAR’s lowest primary vote in some years.
Unlike most of the student population the next Guild election can’t come soon enough for us at Antonate Silvergreen, but until next year, here are the numbers that do and don’t matter:
6
The number of LAUNCH OGCs elected. This explains why despite getting three quarters of the first preference votes of STAR, LAUNCH got twice as many OGCs.
808
The cumulative amount number of first preference votes LAUNCH’s top 13 OGC candidates received. This is compared to the cumulative 688 votes the top 13 STAR OGC candidates received. This may explain the election of 6 LAUNCH OGCs. STAR do circular preferencing where preferences are directed to the next STAR candidate down the ballot. This year LAUNCH also used circular preferencing. However, given the outcome, we at Antonate Silvergreen suspect they employed some other strategy to direct votes to key candidates. Whatever they did, it worked.
31 candidates
The number of candidates for ordinary Guild councillor (OGC) who received zero votes.
30 votes
The number of votes required for an OGC candidate to get their $10 deposit back — candidates must receive at least 10% of the quota (one 13th of the votes) to get their deposit back. In total, 37 candidates received this many votes, which means 274 candidates didn’t.
43%
The proportion of formal OGC ballots that were exhausted. That means that none of the people numbered on the ballots were elected. So 43% of people didn’t vote for a single one of the 13 councillors who were elected.
181 ballots
The number of informal OGC votes. With 311 names on the ballot it’s easy to stuff up, or do what one of these authors did and write “TOO MANY CANDIDATES” in all caps diagonally across the ballot.
9.26
The mean number of first preference votes received by LAUNCH OGC candidates. The means for STAR, LEFT ACTION and YES FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY were 13.86, 12.27 and 17 respectively.
See you next year stupol friends!
Words by Julian Coleman and Ed Hollingdale