University | 12:52 pm | April 14, 2012 | By Madeline McMahon

Election results contested

The results of Yale College Council presidential election are currently being contested, according to the YCC Elections Committee.

John Gonzalez ’14 was declared the winner Friday night, taking 39.79 percent of the vote. Eric Eliasson ’14 came in second, with 30.73 percent of the vote. According to an elections packet distributed to candidates, a race goes to a runoff when the leading candidate receives less than 50 percent of the vote, and the margin separating the leader from the second-place candidate is smaller than 5 percent.

After the election results were released, Eliasson said he wanted to double check the runoff stipulation in the YCC’s constitution. According to the YCC’s constitution, a candidate who receives less than 40 percent of the vote is the winner if he or she also receives 10 percent more votes than the second place candidate. Gonzalez received less than 40 percent of the vote, and his margin of victory over Eliasson was 9.06 percent.

Eliasson said he contacted the Elections Committee “to get an opinion” on the matter. YCC Vice President Omar Njie said the Elections Committee is meeting today to discuss the rhetoric used in the YCC Constitution. Njie declined to comment about the discrepancy in election rules.

“I wanted to be clear about the rules,” Eliasson said.

Cristo Liautaud ’14 came in third place with 29.47 percent of the vote.

Comments
  • bowwow

    Might wanna distinguish between percent and percentage points too when you rewrite this stuff, guys.

    • classof12or13

      This. John had over 25% more votes than the second-place candidate so there is nothing to contest.

  • JE14

    Does this mean Cristo is still in or is it a runoff between Eric and John?

    • Veritas

      Now it’s just between Eric and John.

      • Yale_14Bro

        More lackluster election coverage by the YDN… About the half the campus is under the impression Cristo is still in the running. Not sure who has dropped the ball more on this one- the Elections Committee or the YDN

  • obsyed

    i sent an email to the committee about this earlier– the ycc constitution delineates the rules that if the candidate wins by below 40% he/she has to win by a 10% margin over the other two candidates… but that is mathematically impossible.at max, if a candidate gets 39%, the other two candidates need to get 29% or below. even at the max value, 39 + 29 + 29= 97% ==> it doesn’t add to 100%! that means that even in that situation, the three extra percentage points would be added to one of the two 29%s, violating the 10% margin, making it impossible for a candidate to win by less than 40% vote, automatically defaulting to a runoff.

    • haletinytea

      Suppose there are 4 candidates (is that allowed by the YCC Constitution?) Let the leading candidate have 39 percent of the votes and the remaining candidates split the remaining votes evenly. Then the non-leading candidates each get 20 and 1/3 percent of the vote. Each of these candidates then satisfy the property that they each receive less than 29 percent (39 – 10) of the vote and the total percentage represented by the candidates is (3*20.33333)+39= 100.

      In general, such a construction works for all N greater than 3: Let the percent vote received by the leading candidate be 40-epsilon percent. Let the other candidates each receive an equal share of the remaining percentage of votes. Then the question is for what N is 40 – epsilon – 10 > (60 + epsilon)/(N-1). Solving for N we see that this inequality holds for all N > 90/(30 – epsilon). Letting epsilon go to zero, we can see the inequality holds for all N > 3.

      P.S. This is in no way to suggest that the YCC Constitution is an internally consistent document. The copy of the YCC Constitution to which I have access (at http://ycc.yale.edu/files/2011/09/The-Yale-College-Council-Constitution1.pdf ) has at least one error/typo relating, an error relating to the very issue at hand. Article III, Section One, paragraph b. states; “b. All officers shall be elected by student-body wide election, described in Article X.” Of course, it is Article IX that is titled “Elections” while Article X is titled “Amendment Procedures.”

  • Yale1215

    very true. I guess the YCC wanted to make sure that if the winner had less than 40%, the top two must run off so that the eventual winner would have a majority. This shows how close this election was with three people. Three people always mess up an election. Now with two people, we’ll see were the election goes.

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