“I think there was just so much controversy and so many loopholes and things that went wrong in previous elections, and it wasn’t good internally for the USG or for the student body perception of the USG,” said U-Council chair Maria Salciccioli ’09, a member of the USG’s Constitutional/Voting Reform Working Group.
One of the most notable changes is the restriction of early access to election results to as few people as possible. These individuals would not have been involved in the election and would hold an appointed position.
Salciccioli said it was unclear who had access to the results in the past. Several members of the USG had the password needed to view the results during past elections, she added, explaining that unauthorized individuals could have seen the vote tallies before the results had been verified. In the last election, the possibility that USG officials might have prematurely viewed election results complicated the controversy, leading to elections managers calling for two revotes, both of which were subsequently canceled.
New changes to the USG rules also state that election results may be contested only within the first week following the election.
“After one week, what’s done is done,” Salciccioli said. But, she added, “If there is some sort of ambiguity, we do want to review it.”
The USG is not eliminating revotes entirely, though.
“We do want re-elections [when necessary], we’re just trying to cut down on errors and on revotes due to error,” Salciccioli added in an e-mail. “The aim is to make things very fair but also to move past elections quickly.”
Another major change in the guidelines reflects the committee’s effort to make USG elections more transparent, she noted.
Candidates caught perpetrating campaign violations will receive a certain number of penalty points, and those who receive more than 50 of these points will be disqualified. Campaign violations will also be classified according to three categories.
“I believe our new penalty system is a step in the right direction towards issuing penalties that more fairly fit the violation,” USG president Connor Diemand-Yauman ’10 said.
Under the new rules, every violation, as well as how many penalty points the candidate received, will be explained in a post on the USG website.
“This is not to discourage students from voting for that candidate, but to encourage candidates to run a clean election,” Salciccioli explained.
Future elections will not only be cleaner, but greener, USG officials said. To promote sustainability, the campaign printing limit will be reduced from 300 to 200 sheets of paper.
Candidates will also be required to BCC the elections manager on all of their campaign e-mails.
Though the USG working group recommended all the changes it deemed necessary for the upcoming election, further alterations will be made if necessary, Diemand-Yauman noted.
“The USG will continue to revise the elections packet as well as tighten up loose ends in the USG constitution that have gone under the radar for far too long,” he said.
In addition to Salciccioli, the working group responsible for recommending the changes included senior elections manager Sophie Jin ’11, junior elections manager Addie Darling ’12, U-Councilors Jacob Candelaria ’09 and Lang Wang ’11, and Class of 2011 senator Helen Chen.
After December’s election controversy, voting and constitutional reform became “a top priority,” Diemand-Yauman said. “Those who run for positions in the USG deserve the most fair and clear elections process as possible,” he explained.
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