All Queen Mary students can vote in the elections. For students based at Mile End, Whitechapel, Charterhouse Square and Lincoln's Inn Fields, voting is done at the polling stations on campus. Students that aren't based on these campuses or have requested a reasonable adjustment for accessibility purposes can vote online at qmsu.org/elections. To vote, you will need to log in to the website using your University username and password.
The voting system the Students’ Union uses is called Single Transferable Vote (STV). Under STV, voters are asked to rank the candidates in order of preference (1, 2, 3, etc). You can include as many or as few of the candidates as you like, but you can’t give more than one candidate the same ranking. For each election, there is also the option to Re-open Nominations (R.O.N.) -- you can select this in your ranking if at any point you do not think any of the remaining candidates should be elected and think that nominations should be reopened.
Once voting has closed, the votes are counted in stages. At each stage, the candidate with the lowest number of votes will be eliminated and the votes for that candidate are transferred to their voters’ next preferences. This happens until all votes have been reallocated and a winner is elected. In order to win an election, a candidate must win over 50% of the vote.
You can learn more about STV and how votes are reallocated here.
Voting from mobile devices (e.g. phones, tablets or laptops)
Students that aren't based at Mile End, Whitechapel, Charterhouse Square or Lincoln's Inn Fields are able to vote online. When they do this, their device technically counts as a polling station. As stated in the election rules, candidates and their supporters are not allowed to campaign near a polling station, so if someone is using the mobile device to vote, you should step away and allow them to vote without interruptions.