AMEND: Section 1. The President, the Executive Vice President, and the Regional Vice Presidents shall be elected once every three (3) years by a secret ballot vote utilizing preferential voting. All active members in good standing shall be eligible to vote for the President and the Executive Vice President, and all active members in good standing of each respective region shall be eligible to vote for the Regional Vice President of that region. The candidates for each office receiving a majority of the eligible votes actually cast shall be declared the winning candidate. In the event no candidate receives a majority of the votes cast, a runoff election will be held between the two candidates receiving the most votes. the candidate with the fewest votes will be eliminated and the votes will be transferred to their next available candidate until a majority is achieved.

Rationale: Due to the required use of mail-in ballots our current election process is unavoidably slow. When we have a runoff election that timeline is doubled, at least, as well as the expense. Making use of preferential voting also called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) would eliminate that whole extra step while also saving money from only printing one set of ballots to achieve the same effect. Under an RCV system, each voter would rank the candidates in order of preference. All first choices are tallied and in the event no candidate has a majority, a series of runoffs are simulated by eliminating the candidate with the lowest tally and taking the next choice of those voters. This process repeats until a majority is achieved. RCV encourages more candidates to run since votes for them aren’t “wasted” and can just be transferred to the next preferred candidate in the case they don’t win. RCV also encourages more positive campaigns since candidates compete for second-choice support from their opponents’ supporters. I believe all of these effects would benefit us and allow the Union to more quickly
return to normal operations after election season.