The Student Government elections task force ironed out its plans this weekend to change the elections process, with hopes of more students participating in next year's elections.
Officers on the force said they are not pleased with elections turnout and hope addressing the five main principles of the process will entice more students to participate. Preliminary reform talks began in November, but members say they started working on the legislation about seven weeks ago.
Task force members will present election-reform legislation at Tuesday night's SG meeting.
"I've been disappointed in the past two years that more people have not run for Student Government," said SG president Andrew Solomon. "Students need to stop being so apathetic, and Student Government needs to be more accessible."
One of the biggest complaints students have against elections is the ticket system, Solomon said. Students running as independents feel like they are at a disadvantage and therefore do not run against powerful tickets.
To combat this problem, the committee said all candidates should run as independents, except for the president and vice president, who will run together.
Matt Li ran for president as an independent this year and received 23 percent of the vote. Solomon said Li had no platform and did not address issues he wanted to tackle. Li received
almost one-fourth of the votes, though, because he was anti-establishment and students support independents, Solomon said.
Communication representative Joe Grasso ran as an independent in the 2007 election and said that if everyone ran as an independent, the process would be more transparent and more students would be encouraged to participate.
The task force is also proposing legislation calling for a change in polling times. Members want polls to stay open 24 hours a day instead of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on both voting days. Task force members hope that more people will vote if the hours were more flexible.
Changes could also be made to the amount of money students can spend on campaigns. Students are currently spending as much as $7,000 or $8,000 on campaigning, but new legislation could abolish this rule and allow students to spend an unlimited amount of money on campaigning. However, students will be required to file documentation of every dollar received and spent during campaigning, thus increasing transparency.
"When you set a dollar amount limit, then it becomes the minimum that is spent, and students think they have to spend that amount on their campaigns to be competitive," Solomon said.
If the legislation is approved, students running for SG positions will also be required to comply with other new rules regarding campaigning. Current rules state that students can begin campaigning two weeks prior to elections, but this rule does not address gray areas like starting Facebook groups months before elections. Some students wanting to run for president and vice president in the 2009 election have already started Facebook groups.
"People decide they want to run at different times and start campaigning at different times, so we want to try and give everyone a level playing field," Solomon said. "We think enforcing the two-week rule will do this."
The size of the assembly could also change. Force members want to change the number of representatives from each college within the University from one representative for every 2,000 students to one for every 2,500 students. The task force also wants to do away with the 12 at-large representatives and add eight campus community representatives to the assembly.
"The 'campus community representative' title will be less confusing than the 'at-large' title, and we think having campus and community in the title will show what the representatives are supposed to focus on," Solomon said.
These are changes that will amend the SG Constitution and therefore must be voted on by the entire campus. These changes will likely appear on the 2009 ballot, and any approved legislation will go into effect in the 2010 election.
Solomon and some of his administration will leave office at the beginning of April but said they believe election reform is important to the voting process and the future of SG.
"The point is to leave Student Government better than you found it," Solomon said.
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