If students look at the Talley-Atrium referendum through a mathematical lens, they see several glaring flaws.

Any sort of vote generates a lot of numbers — statistics pertaining to who voted, and which options they chose when voting. In this case, it was up to Student Government to make sure it created a poll which accurately and unambiguously captured the sentiments of students. It had an additional responsibility to interpret the results in a manner consistent with public opinion.



In both of these tasks, Student Government failed. Using axioms of inference and proof, lets logically examine what it did wrong.



Student Government used three criteria to interpret students’ desires: whether students see a need for increased funding, whether a particular fee is a top priority and whether a majority of students voted in support of at least partial funding of a proposed fee increase.



Consider the following statements, which are accurate based on the Rally for Talley vote:



1) If resources were unlimited, students would favor a Talley fee increase.



2) Students do not favor a Talley fee increase in its present form.



The only valid conclusion, based on the contrapositive of our first premise, is:



3) Resources are not unlimited.



This is interesting. The vote asked, “If you had an unlimited supply of money and could fully fund all of these fee increase proposals without it negatively affecting you or any other students, which proposals would you support the most?”



And, of course, students answered that they would support a new Talley Student Center.

Lets translate that into math:



4) Assume you had an unlimited supply of money and that a fee increase would have no negative effects. If this is the case, then we ought to fund Talley.



We just proved, from (1) and (2), that resources are not unlimited. Which means that our assumption in (4) is false.



The conclusion of funding Talley cannot follow from that assumption.



So when Student Government says Talley “was ranked as a top priority,” it was ranked as such under the false premise that money was unlimited. Money is not unlimited, and fee increases are likely to have a negative impact on some students, so we cannot say that it is ranked a top priority.



Therefore, Talley failed not one, but two out of three criteria for recommendation. If each criteria has equal weight (which is of course silly, but is the method Student Senate used), then there is no case for a fee increase.


It is interesting to note that Student Senate cited a 38 percent figure for students making Talley their top priority. What this means is that 62 percent — a majority — did not make Talley their top priority. Worse, Student Government used an “instant runoff” method for tabulating vote results. This means that, basically, students’ votes were redistributed — based on the priorities they chose — until a single choice received a majority of votes. This method is supposed to be used when an election only has a single winner, which is clearly not the case here.



One thing that might have made more sense is to weigh the amount of the fee increase by the proportion of students who made it their top priority.



The point of all of this is to say that there are significant failings in the methods Student Government used to collect data and interpreted it. It is clear the poll results have been misused and that students’ interests are not being represented — mathematical rigor makes this clear.