It's true that the electoral system is extremely tough to understand, and possibly the only person in the university who does understand it fully is Marco Biagi, but does this really matter? The important point is that it genuinely does result in the most generally-acceptable candidate for for any given position. If, for instance, Michael had not been fined, he and I would have been exactly tied on first preference votes, and the decision would have had to have been made by a casting vote of the senior elections officer, which hardly seems fair at all. However, under STV, it seemed that more of those whose first preference was for Louise or Mel would rather have had me in the job than Michael, and the STV system allowed that preference to be reflected, which is surely better than leaving it up to the senior elections officer to decide who was elected. The mathematics that allowed this preference to be taken into account fairly aren't all that important, as long as the preference was reflected in the final result.
Chris Marks took the DoES job automatically because it was decided when the split was ratified that he, as the elected candidate for DoS, should be allowed to decide which area of the job he wanted to take up. Re-running his election wouldn't have made sense because he would have had to win another election for a position he had already essentially won. However, running a separate election for the position he didn't want also made sense, because it meant that people like myself who were never interested in assuming the ES part of the original remit would not have had to stand for it. For instance, had I ran for DoS on the assumption that I would take DoES, I wouldn't have been able to campaign effectively because I would have needed to make everyone understand that the split was happening and I only wanted half of the job in order to make them understand why the policies I was proposing completely ignored that area of the remit (and nobody would have voted for a DoS who said nothing about the Bop). Forby which, at the time of the last election it wasn't even certain that the split was going to take place, and so naturally it wouldn't have been in anyone's interests for me to stand for a job I could only have made a good fist of half of (because if I'd won, I'd have cocked up the ES remit big time, because I'd be useless at it). When they re-ran the election, I was able to say to people, look, I reckon I'm the best person for this new job, and if you agree, please vote for me. There wasn't any confusion about which job I was actually standing for.
It's possible to get a fraction of a vote because when Michael's 25 votes were fined, it was necessary to work out what proportion of his second preferences in total went to each other candidate, and then to allocate them to the others proportionally - the only other possibility would have been to redistribute the first 25 of his votes at random, which would have been unfair because they might not have reflected the overall preference of his voters for other candidates (by chance, one of us might have taken, say, all of his second preference votes, when if a different random sample had been taken, those votes might have gone to someone else). Naturally the proportion of the 25 votes that happened to be allocated to each other candidate included a decimal fraction of a vote - hence I, for instance, ended up with 0.69 of a vote on the first tally. The only strange thing is that the EOC didn't treat Louise's votes in the same way - but that was only because they managed to work out that whilst the immediate redistribution of Michael's fine might have made a difference between whether he or Mel came second, Louises wouldn't have made any difference to the final order at all, so it didn't actually matter. In any event, the eventual outcome in terms of who was elected (even had no fines been levied at all) would not have been affected however the EOC had treated them. Don't worry, guys: I might look like a cowboy, but my name's not George Bush, and I ain't stolen any elections here
