During the last few years at Conn, the Student Government Association has faced the issue of low voter participation in almost every election. It seems that fewer and fewer students on campus are participating in the elections. Last year, so few students voted that the voting quorum had to be reduced drastically from fifty percent to twenty percent just to validate these elections; if only one out of every five students actually votes, how can the election results be said to represent the opinions of the student body as a whole? The answer is: They can’t.
This is becoming a major problem and it is transforming SGA elections into an undemocratic process. According to former SGA Chief of Communications Dorian Ehrlich ‘14, in all student elections held since 2005, the total number of votes cast was less than forty percent of the number of votes that could have been cast. What is it that has been causing so many students to stop voting in the last few years?
Blackstone senator Helaine Goudreau ‘14 put one hypothesis forward. “I think a large part of it comes from the way voting is held,” says Goudreau, who is currently leading a task force with the goal of increasing voter turnout in future elections.
In addition to the appointments of Rossi and Tucker, SGA will conduct two in-house senatorial elections, in Johnson and Katharine Blunt. (The Blunt election will be to replace Rossi, who had to resign as senator in order to take on the duties of Chief of Communications.) Fisher noted that there might also soon be a third senatorial election thanks to a room change by another Assembly member. “[T]he campus is sent one large email with the link to vote, and most people either delete the email right away because it’s from the dreaded ‘Office of College Relations,’ or put off the voting until later and then just don’t do it.”
Goudreau believes that elections need to have a greater physical presence on campus in order to produce a better turnout, citing the freshman class council elections of this fall as an example. The class of 2015 had several candidates for each position and they got excited about the election. Many candidates had posters, and Mike Murgo ’15 (who became freshman class president) managed to scrawl his name across the campus using only chalk. The class of 2015 had excellent voter turnout in this fall’s elections; it would have been a valid election even under the old quorum of fifty percent. If every campus election had the same degree of passion and enthusiasm as this one, it certainly could make a difference in voter turnout.
Another likely explanation for the low voting percentages is that students have stopped caring about SGA. College campuses are notorious for student apathy, and Conn is no exception. But why are students losing interest in SGA and, more importantly, what can be done about it?
“To me, as a student of politics, the most plausible conclusion from the lack of voter turnout seems to be that what SGA does (or more importantly, can do) is not important enough, because if it was, people would vote, and there would be multiple candidates for each position, which is not the case,” says Mihir Sharma ’12, Chief of Academic Affairs. I don’t want to say that SGA isn’t important, but if that perception exists, it could certainly pose a problem.
For example, the Chiquita banana resolution was a key issue on SGA’s agenda. I understand that it is a pertinent issue, and I’ve seen proof that a number of students on campus are passionate about it. Having said that, take the issue and put it in the context of our small college community. While there are some students that are quite concerned about the bananas, the great majority of people on campus do not have strong opinions on the matter.
Now that the resolution has been officially passed, Harris might not have bananas as often, Conn has rid its own hands of the “bloody bananas” and Dole and Chiquita suffer an unnoticeable loss in sales. Besides appeasing a few strongly opinionated students, the resolution has made little difference in campus life or in the world. I’m not saying that it’s unimportant to address these issues; “banana resolutions” like this are okay now and then, but maybe SGA needs to tackle issues that are closer to home if it wants to grab the attention of the student body as a whole.
SGA does a lot of important backstage work, coordinating many different events, but the campus community rarely hears about them— all they hear about are SGA’s big projects, most of which hold marginal interest for them. Perhaps this is not so much SGA’s fault, but the fault of the student body. The campus community seems to be unfamiliar with SGA, and this makes people think SGA is distant and hard to talk to.
In reality, it’s not that way at all. “Senators would love to hear from constituents and propose resolutions,” said Sharma, “There are many students who have taken the initiative to get things done through SGA or in association therewith, without ever having served as an assembly member or having the learned the Robert’s rules or order.” SGA has become disconnected from the students, and that may be the reason that students have started to lose interest. “I think it’s just about engagement,” said Ehrlich. “[Students] vaguely hear about the issues and they aren’t well informed enough to make an opinion.”
The task force led by Goudreau is a step in the right direction. They have ideas for future elections, including common room promotional “voting nights” with house senators and pizza, campaign tables in Harris for candidates to advertise their platforms and qualifications and open forum discussion nights.
It shouldn’t be up to SGA alone. Students also have a responsibility to get involved in the elections. People need to talk to their house senators and try going to house council to maintain an informed stance about student government. Most importantly, take a few minutes of your time and cast a vote next spring. Maybe we can restore the old quorum and turn SGA into a democratic organization that is much more closely involved with the student body. •
Hi Gregory!
While lack of participation in SGA is one problem, another is that CT overseas military voters need help from students! As you know, Cyber bullying is the mean and unfair treatment of a person on the Internet. They had a feeding frenzy of it recently in Connecticut (CT). [1] Here’s what happened.
Some anti-Internet voting political science department from a CT university, and their allies, organized a lop-sided panel to “discuss” the pros and cons of the Northern state taking up Internet voting. Three avidly anti-Internet voting computer science professors, and a rich lady who owns an anti-Internet voting website, were on one side of the panel. Completely alone on the other side was Natalie Tennant, Secretary of State for West Virginia.[2]
This wasn’t an actual “discussion;” instead, it was an online propaganda festival of anti-Internet voting negativity interspersed with just a few positive statements from Secretary Tennant. Ron Rivest, one of the biased computer scientists, provided some telling examples of the lack of scientific sophistication his side displayed. Early in the proceeding Professor Rivest wittily declared that the term “Internet voting” is an oxymoron, like “safe cigarettes.” Cute, but where’s the science? At no point in the day did he, or any of the opposition, present any facts about actual breaches of security in an Internet voting trial (except, of course, the DC hack, which was not done in an actual election [3]).
Secretary Tennant encouraged Connecticut to use Internet voting for its overseas military voters. She stated that the West Virginia legislature had long been concerned that members of the overseas military were unable to vote because the method of voting by mail was too inconvenient and prone to errors. After the 2009 MOVE Act required the states to set up systems for electronically sending ballots to overseas military, the state legislature began considering legislation to allow her office to set up a system of Internet voting. The resulting legislation passed unanimously.
The new law required an initial trial involving just a few counties. The first test was the primary vote in 2010. It went so well that Secretary Tennant asked the legislature to expand the number of counties involved for the general election vote, which they promptly did.
Professor Alex Halderman interrupted Ms. Tennant and demanded to know how her office vetted the companies that provided the Internet voting service. She replied that the vendors had to agree to several conditions. One of these was that third party experts had to be allowed to inspect the equipment and operating codes the vendors used. She said the companies not only agreed to these conditions, but offered to do the whole job for free, as a demonstration project. Given that situation, the Secretary’s office decided not to exercise its right to bring in a third party inspector. She said she trusted the companies.
At one point, Prof Rivest, who had never had any personal interaction with the company representatives, declared that the vendors could be corrupt and she wouldn’t know it. Isn’t that possible, he demanded.
She said that besides trusting the vendor you have to trust every kind of vote counting machine, not just Internet voting servers. CT, for example, uses optical scanning machines to count its votes. The voter fills in a bubble with a pencil on a paper card. But suppose one of the employees feeding the cards to the scanning machine in the election office is an unscrupulous partisan. He can hide a piece of pencil lead under his finger nail, and put an extra mark on cards with votes he doesn’t like. Then the machine would reject the card as a double vote, and nobody would know that a vote had been sabotaged.
Her point, of course, is that every complex vote counting system requires some degree of trust. Election officials have to exercise their professional judgment as to when such trust is reasonable. In reply to a question from the moderator, Ms. Tennant stated that she trusted the workers in her department because it was like a small community. She trusted the system because it used military grade encryption, had an intrusion detection function, and other security checks. She also pointed out that it was a serious felony to tamper with elections, and this law is a part of the security system.
Professor Halderman pressed the matter by demanding to know if West Virginia would allow hackers a chance to try to hack into the system, like the officials did in Washington DC. She said that the system actually belonged to the companies, and that the state lacked the authority to invite hackers to freely test the system.
He: What’s so secret that venders won’t open it up?
She: I can’t answer for them, professor.
He: Why didn’t you require a public test?
She: (With a smile,) we did do some testing, and caught an inverted number.
He: In the future would you run a public trial, like DC?
She: I can’t say right now.
The website owner, Ms. Dzieduszycka-Suinat, suggested that West Virginia was using its overseas military voters as “guinea pigs.” Later Prof Rivest blurted out, with all the science he could muster, that Internet voting is “like skating on thin ice.”
Undaunted, Ms. Tennant stated in her concluding remarks that she still feels that she made the right judgment by trusting the companies. She felt that she was doing the right thing for West Virginia’s military voters. Her husband is stationed in Afghanistan, and he saw first hand how difficult voting is for many of the service personnel there. The lone defender of Internet voting on this panel, she said that if she must, for the sake of her military voters, (and I quote) “I’ll continue to sit up here and take the attacks, take the arrows … and things like that.”
As the panelists rose from their seats to leave the stage, Ron Rivest was heard to exclaim, “Internet voting is like drunk driving,” and he burst into triumphant laughter.
[1] See video at http://www.ctvoterscount.org/secretary-of-the-states-online-voting-symposium/
[2] See Natalie Tennant: Internet Voting Profile in Courage http://t.co/aRd9W3o
[3] RE: DC see http://tinyurl.com/DCin2010
Email Denise Merrill Connecticut Secretary of State and ask that she follow West Virginia’s lead to serve CT’s military voters:
denise.merrill@ct.gov
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
Blog: http://tinyurl.com/IV4All
Twitter: wjkno1
Email: Internetvoting@gmail.com
Author of Internet Voting Now!
Kindle edition: http://tinyurl.com/IntV-Now
In paper: http://tinyurl.com/IVNow2011