How Voting Works

The Voting System

The voting system at Beds SU is bespoke to us and therefore looks a little different to what you might see in a local/national election in the UK. We recommend you familiarise yourself with this as voters may ask you how to vote: any questions you can’t answer, please forward to elections@beds.ac.uk. 

How to vote

All registered students at the University of Bedfordshire, from all UK campuses, are eligible to vote. All students will vote online through www.bedssu.co.uk/vote.

We use the Alternative Vote (AV) system. This means that voters can rank candidates in order of preference. Instead of putting a cross in a box next to your favourite candidate, voters can put a 1 next to their 1st choice, a 2 next to their 2nd choice, and so on. Voters can rank as many or as few candidates as they choose. 

This should mean that your vote never goes to waste: if a voter does not get their first-choice preference, they may get their second or third, etc. Because of this, you can still “win” votes from people who say they are voting for someone else if, for example, they put you as their second preference: if their first choice is knocked out in earlier rounds, their second preference vote is counted in a subsequent round.

Changing Votes: Voters have the right to change their vote at any point until the close of elections. This means that even voters who have already voted are worth talking to.

Re-Open Nominations: On the ballot, there is always the option to ‘Re-Open Nominations’, otherwise known as RON. RON is always counted as a valid candidate, therefore if RON wins an election, the Students’ Union would have to re-open nominations for that position and run the elections for that position again. 

Problems Voting?

All registered students at UoB can log on to the Beds SU website using their UoB log in and submit their vote anytime between 18:00 Monday 8th March – 16:00 Wednesday 24th March.

If there is a student facing technical issues, they must contact elections@beds.ac.uk as soon as possible for support. We cannot handle issues if we do not know the student details and the nature of the issue, so please encourage students with issues to send us screenshots of the error, alongside their details.

The Count

This year we are using a new voting system, similar to the American “electoral college” system, to better represent the views and voices of students at our smaller campuses. Our new system is based on two tried and tested systems of voting, so even though it may be new to us, we can have confidence in the system returning us an accurate result.

We count the votes by campus groups. The campus groups are listed below. Each campus group has a set number of ‘Campus Points’ available to it. The more votes you win at each campus, the more ‘Campus Points’ you win from each campus.

The overall winner, is the candidate with the most Campus Points. This means that candidates willhave to win over voters on more than one campus in order to win the overall election.

The winners of the Campus Points will be decided using Alternative Vote. This looks much like our previous systems that you may be familiar with:

• 1st preference votes (those ranked “1” by voters) are counted and Campus Points awarded where candidates have reached the threshold (e.g. if there are 3 Campus Points up for grabs and one candidate has more than 33% of the vote, they will be awarded 1 of the 3 Campus Points)

• If no other candidate has enough votes to secure the other Campus Points, we will start to eliminate candidates and redistribute votes to the 2nd preferences (those ranked “2” by voters), starting with the candidates with the fewest votes

• This cycle repeats until all Campus Points have been awarded

Once all the counts have taken place across all campus groups, we then count the number of Campus Points each candidate has. The candidate with the most overall Campus Points wins (the winner is decided by the First-past-the-post method - this should be familiar to you as per the American election system - although we nearly always have more than 2 candidates fighting for votes!).