Actually, grads require a 2/3 majority to bring in a new fee, so it was really off by about 800 votes :) (i.e. 800 more grads would have had to vote yes).

Oh wow, thanks Grad Student.

That's too bad. I still want my UPASS.

How does that math work?

If 1476 grad students had voted, and 66% of the people needed to vote YES for the new fee to be approved, you'd need 975 votes.

Only 700 people voted yes, so they were short by 275 votes. That's much less than 'about 800 votes'

Am I missing something here?

Luckily I'm a Math whiz, so I can help you out. And yes, you're missing something (although not entirely your fault).

If you keep the total number of votes at 1476, then yes, you would need 975 Yes votes, but since the number of votes is stuck at 1476, that means that only 501 people could vote no, rather than 760. So if you could convince 260 people who voted No to *not* vote, and get an extra 275 people to vote yes, then you would be right.

My scenario was "Assume everyone who has already voted doesn't change their vote... then how many additional people would have to vote yes". And that number would be about 800, so you'd have about 750 NO and 1500 YES (basically you need 2 times as many Yes votes as No votes to get a 2/3 majority)

Either way, it's a tough sell... You'd have to convince 250+ people to reverse their vote from No to Yes, or convince 800 grads that didn't vote to vote Yes. Or some combination of those ideas.

What would we do without mathies?