Comparing voting methods for budget decisions on the ASSU ballot

During the 2018 Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU; Stanford’s student body) election and annual grants process, the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team (SCDT) ran a research ballot and survey to develop insights into voting behavior on the budget component of the ballot (annual grants) where multiple grant requests (hereafter: ‘projects’) are considered. We provided voters with additional voting methods for the budget component, collected further insights through a survey and demonstrated the viability of the proposed workflow. Some of our (preliminary) findings are directly relevant to ASSU:
- If ASSU decides to implement a budget cap to the annual grants process, the knapsack voting method has shown to be a good option.
- Voters reported the knapsack ballot generally easier to use than the official ASSU ballot and were more confident that their preferences would be taken into account. The appreciation for knapsack voting is generally higher than that for comparison voting.
- While the resulting ranking of yes/no voting and knapsack voting are similar, there are some projects that get a different appreciation when voters are constrained by a budget.
- Voters requested that more information be provided about the projects.
- The different mechanisms provide more insight on student opinions regarding the projects than
does the official ballot alone.
Furthermore, the (appropriately anonymized) data gathered in this year’s research ballots is beneficial for research purposes.
Overall, our platform and pipeline (PB Stanford) with post-validation of ballots functioned well on a large scale. In particular, the knapsack ballot mechanism shows promise in voter feedback.