[EM] The successful repeal of Approval by the Dartmouth Board of Trustees

[Jameson Quinn]

2013/1/27 Gervase Lam <gervase.lam at group.force9.co.uk>

> I was looking through the Approval Voting article and noticed that it
> mentioned that in 2009 the Dartmouth Board of Trustees had Approval
> successfully repealed.
>
> It quotes an article in the web saying: "When the alumni electorate
> fails to take advantage of the approval voting process, the three
> required Alumni Council candidates tend to split the majority vote,
> giving petition candidates an advantage."
>
> There is a link to the article.
>
> <http://thedartmouth.com/2009/04/03/opinion/verbum/>
>
> Can anybody give any further background on this?  The details in the
> article look a bit sparse.
>

I'm not an insider on this. But from what I saw, basically the repeal was
because the insiders didn't like the results. I don't think they had a
strong argument that the results were undemocratic, they just wanted to go
back to a system that they knew better how to manipulate.

(This is not based on extensive research, just reading about 3-4 articles
on this and reading between the lines. So I could be wrong. Also it's been
a few years since I really looked at this.)

Jameson


>
> I think that the reason for the Approval failure was due to the "three
> required Alumni Council candidates".  But I don't really know.
>
> Can somebody comment in further detail on why Approval was unsuccessful
> in this case?
>
> Thanks,
> Gervase.
>
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