The Associated Students of UNM passed a bill last week to change the method in which an election tie is settled.
The new bill calls for a coin flip to settle the matter in the event of a tie for a final senate seat.
ASUNM President Jenna Hagengruber said prior to this piece of legislation, a tie was regularly settled through a run-off election. That means if two senators tied for the same seat they would have to campaign by themselves for the next week until the run-off election.
“That’s just a lot of extra energy,” Hagengruber said. “To make these people, who’ve already put in weeks and weeks of effort, go out on their own without the backing of their team.”
ASUNM Senator Ben Maggard proposed the bill at last week’s meeting in cooperation with the election commission, who collectively felt that a runoff election was ultimately inefficient.
Maggard said the bill only applies to a senate position; ties involving vice presidential and presidential candidates will still be settled via the run-off.
“Because those positions are so large scale, we are still going to be doing a runoff election,” Hagengruber said. “But with senate, we are just going to do a coin toss.”
Maggard said they arrived at the bill through brainstorming with the elections commission.
Those talks turned into questioning “whether or not that is an appropriate use of time and resources to have a runoff election for the final senator position, if there’s a tie,” he said. “Which, honestly is quite possible given how tight these elections tend to be.”
Going forward, a tie for senate position will be settled by a coin-flip that will be overseen by the elections commission, he said.
“I understand the reluctance to leave something as simple as a coin flip to determine this, but in the interest of efficiency and use of resources, and to minimize a potential for bias, that’s why we selected the coin toss,” Maggard said.
Maggard, Elections Commission Executive Director Nadia Cabrera and a few others had lengthy discussions to back up their decision, in addition to finding data that coin flips often settle ties nationally in many organizations, he said.
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They tried to figure out some alternative mechanism but were unable to come up with anything as efficient and unbiased, he said.
“There’s no existing students or student organizations or individuals who we feel comfortable turning to to arbitrate this,” Maggard said.
ASUNM Senator Jorge Guerrero said he felt the fairest thing to do is to leave it up to chance.
“I’d rather leave it up to chance than to leave it up to someone who might have a bias,” he said. “If there is a tie that means that those two people are doing great. Those two people are going to be great candidates, whoever wins.”
Hagengruber said she stands by the bill knowing ASUNM passed it after a lot of thought.
“If the students think that they’re both equally qualified, then who are we to try and say, ‘no one of you is more qualified than the other,’ it should come down to a coin toss,” she said.
Matthew Reisen is the news editor for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @dailylobo.
