Reforming USG elections

The results are in, and next semester Alex Lenahan '07 will succeed Leslie-Bernard Joseph '06 as USG president. But the election process this year has been anything but smooth; indeed, it has been marred by several troubling irregularities having to do with the USG elections board. We believe that the USG leadership must address these irregularities in order to ensure cleaner and fairer elections in the future.

The first irregularity has to do with the membership of the elections board. One of the board's members, Vice President Jesse Creed '07, is the current roommate of Tom Brown '07, one of the first-round presidential candidates.

This was unacceptable. To be sure, we have absolutely no reason to believe that Creed was anything other than completely objective and fair in his role as a member of the USG elections board. But that doesn't absolve the USG president of ensuring that no member of the board has any obvious reason to favor one candidate over the others, both to make the elections process as fair as possible and to dispel any appearance of impropriety. Moreover, there needs to be a clear, formal process by which candidates have the opportunity to bring up such issues at the beginning of their campaigns.

One simple solution would be to have the USG president draw up a list of 10 names and then sit down with the presidential candidates to hear any objections; the three highest-ranked consensus people on the list could then serve as an elections board that would satisfy all.

In addition to this problem, the election was also marked by an astounding number of alleged rule violations on the part of some presidential candidates. Once again, the USG elections board seems to have acted in good faith when reviewing claims against the candidates. Yet the standard of proof necessary for making the decision to censure a candidate remains a bit unclear. Freddie Flaxman '07, for example, was cited for posting more than one flier on a bulletin board, in violation of campaign regulations. While at least one campaign staffer admitted to the double-postering, Flaxman said he removed all offending posters within the 18-hour grace period allowed to him after he was notified of the violation. But elections managers say they were notified about offending posters after that time period, which would have led to further penalties.

We are certainly not in a better position than the elections board to judge the truth and severity of these violations. But it does remain unclear how the elections board weighed these circumstances in their decision and how they determined that Flaxman had not actually made a good faith effort to remove the offending fliers. Once again, the required standard of proof, especially in a hard-to-regulate area like postering, remains troublingly unclear.

This example points to a further problem: Though students are notified on the ballot that a candidate has been censured, they have very little idea of what that actually means. It then becomes difficult for them to decide how to factor these violations into their voting decisions. While the USG should not gratuitously list every violation on the actual ballot, it should seriously think about how it can provide clearer information to voters.

In the end, these are all difficult problems to address. That does not mean, however, that the USG should simply ignore them. Instead, it should make election reform one of its top priorities in the coming semesters. This can only improve the credibility of the election process and increase voter confidence in the USG.