Editors’ Note: This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of The Voice.
The recent SGA board elections were an insult to the ideals of student democracy that SGA espouses. In uncontested elections, five positions were filled, including those of president and vice-president. It is shocking to stand by and watch as half of the newly elected officers of SGA are sworn in without any opposition or scrutiny. Just four months ago, there was division and uproar over the behavior of many of the SGA board members. Now Connecticut College students seem content to ignore SGA’s latest coup.
Admittedly, the controversy that SGA faced last December has likely negatively impacted students’ opinion of SGA. Only three of the ten positions had candidates running who lacked experience holding office in SGA, including two of the three candidates for Chair of Diversity and Equity, which suggests that perhaps many students outside of SGA do not want to get involved in the student governmental process. I spoke with Ramzi Kaiss ’17, who was elected next year’s president of SGA unopposed, and he agreed with me that the lack of opposition in the recent elections was “not great for the school and not great for SGA,” an opinion that especially resonated with his own predicament of having been elected president without a test from any opposition. Kaiss also felt that students have disengaged from the process, saying, “You don’t have a campus-wide atmosphere” for elections. He noted that at speech night, he felt like not many attendees were actually trying to form opinions on the candidates.
On another note, last Thursday the SGA assembly was presented with the long-awaited proposal for revising the SGA bylaws that has been in the works since last summer. In my opinion, almost all of the changes that are being proposed should be made. I did, however, notice that a rule claiming house senators “should remain aware of larger campus issues surrounding topics of inclusivity and diversity” has been eliminated. That line should be brought back, as senators need to pay attention to all campus issues — with a special focus on equity and inclusion.
Overall, the changes being made are incredibly superficial and involve eliminating and adding parts and aspects of SGA that have either ceased to exist or come into being. There’s nothing hidden in this document that will have serious effects on its operation. That being said, I would not consider the SGA bylaws a “living document” that should be changed every year, which is its official status. The bylaws are still incredibly oblique and occasionally contradictory.
Admittedly, if the changes had been more drastic I might be writing an article encouraging the assembly to reject them. If I were to suggest one major change to the bylaws, I would recommend downsizing the role of the Parliamentarian. The role of that office has been questioned this year, likely because the position is too powerful for an unelected officer. The bylaws have still not been revised to clarify the difference between the roles of the President and Parliamentarian, as both appear to have the authority to run SGA meetings. In most deliberative bodies, the president runs meetings and the parliamentarian advises the president rather than running the meeting themselves. The Assembly shonld take a closer look at the Parliamentarian’s responsibilities.
I worry that no matter how the bylaws are changed, the Assembly will still rely too heavily on the people running it to give it direction. At present, the Assembly is supposed to be run under Robert’s Rules, but the revision adds the option of using “a suitable alternative.” Robert’s Rules offer members of a-deliberative body a guide for conducting fair and effective meetings. For example, Robert’s Rules grant members the right to appeal a president’s decision. Assembly members should remember that ultimately they have a say in every scenario. At the moment, if a seriously rogue SGA board ever held power, the only recourse the assembly would have would be to impeach its members. This is wrong. There needs to be more clearly articulated ways to check the power of the board if the need arises.
Recently, the elections highlighted another essential issue: the difference between voting online and voting using a paper ballot or in-house meetings. The SGA bylaws were written under the assumption that paper ballots would be used, and this language still more or less exists in the revised version. Online systems are actually much more limiting than paper because they require the people programming them to take into account the many things a person can do with a paper ballot. In April 2015, Taryn Kitchen ’16 wrote an excellent piece here in the Voice revealing discrepancies in the tallying of votes on Camel web for honor council candidates, which, according to Chief of Cornmunications Julia Horowitz , 18, has been fixed with this year’s switch to ConnQuest. While yes, these systems have improved, I was still able to find problems that physical ballots would not allow.
Write-ins have been abandoned. Julia Horowitz, Sal Bigay, and Addie Poris state: “We believe that if you are dedicated enough to running for SGA, you should run an official campaign, not a write-in one,” and the current system supports this notion: ConnQuest does not allow people to cast write-in votes. However, having write-ins would have made the recent elections more legitimate because in theory, all five candidates who were running unopposed could have been defeated. I should know; four years ago my mom ran as a write-in candidate protesting the reelection of a rather divisive city councilor. She received 100 of the 1500 votes cast after only a week’s worth of telling people to vote for her. Write-ins exist for a reason; they give people the opportunity to protest candidates and occasionally form a safety net. If I could make one serious reform to the current process, it would be to reinstate write-ins. If the SGA assembly wishes to do so, they should consider sending a request to the company that manufactures ConnQuest to add this capability.
Students are required to vote for every position on the ballot. Like any good obnoxious online form, ConnQuest will not accept your ballot unless you vote for all the offices listed on it. This is different from a paper ballot which permits students to obstain from voting for certain positions. However, voting “abstain” and an actual abstention are not the same thing. Based on my interpretation of the bylaws and several e-mails I exchanged with Horowitz, I came to the conclusion that voting “abstain” actually means that a student is voting for someone to get elected, in, essence voting “yes.” However, after discussing my conclusions with her, Ibelieve that abstaining is often treated as a student expressing disapproval for the candidates, in essence voting “no.” Still these passages remain unrevised and indicate a procedure where voting “abstain” could be treated as a vote in favor of an unopposed candidate. Thus, the bylaws could be reinterpreted in that way in the future.
The official guide to Robert’s Rules, Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised in Brief, says: “The phrase ‘abstention votes’ is an oxymoron, an abstention being a refusal to vote. To abstain means to refrain from voting, and, as a consequence, there can be no such thing as an ‘abstention vote.’” According to Horowitz, Bigay, and Poris: “Abstentions are still an exercise of voting power that actively abstains your right to vote for either candidate, functioning as a third option. The technical definition is Abstention (n): an instance of declining to vote for or against a proposal or motion.”
Perhaps abstentions are an exercise of voting power, but that does not mean that they should be treated as such. The current process gets around this loophole by forcing people to vote their abstentions” which is not the same thing as the technical definition of abstention. To abstain is not to make a selection, in essence to not vote, whereas choosing “abstain” is voting.
I quote in full a response from Paris to a follow-up question I sent about students’ inability to mark their abstentions: “We believe that each position on Executive Board and Chairs is equally important to the maintenance of shared governance at Connecticut College, and that the Board and Chairs should focus as a cohesive whole. Therefore, all of the positions on the ballot require either a vote or an abstention – if you’re going to participate in voting for one office, you should participate in voting for all of them. That being said, as we outlined before, -the ‘abstention’ option is there if you prefer not to vote for all of the offices listed on a ballot.”
In the original bylaws, class or student election proceedings (which do not include house elections, such as house senator and house council) required a detailed proposal to be approved by the Assembly. The new bylaws, however, state that only major changes need the Assembly’s approval. If the chiefs of communications had ever submitted detailed proposals, someone in the Assembly likely would have caught on to some of the discrepancies that Kitchen and I have found. As it stands, the Board may have to run changes through the Assembly in the future, but the status quo won’t change unless someone on the assembly does something about it.
Some voices in the Assembly have called for more oversight. Again. contrary to the bylaws, this year the Board fan house senator elections online rather than having Housefellows run them during the initial house meetings, a decision that the Board made in consultation with REAL staff. The Assembly later debated the merits of this decision and the precedent it set. During a debate at the September 17 SGA meeting former Blackstone house senator Wesley Chrabasz –one of many senators to resign in December– questioned the decision to override the bylaws. According to the meeting minutes, Poris responded: “The bylaws are self contradictory and confusing. Every week I’m sitting down with the bylaws and revising them. Whenever we figure out how we as a body we’ll move forward. [sic]” Chrabasz then asked Poris to notify the Assembly if she was making other changes, which she agreed to do. In my opinion the switch to online elections was innovative, and the revisions reflect that by stating that the SGA board and Housefellows will now decide how house senator elections are run each year. However, I would encourage future boards and Housefellows to let the decision be made by members of the house during the initial house meeting in keeping with the democratic spirit of house life.
However, the exchange between Chrabasz and Poris shows the Board limiting the oversight and authority the Assembly has over its decisions. Senators like Chrabasz fight for the Assembly’s power, and they are the same senators who resign upon recognizing the futility in attempting reform. Robert’s Rules give a great deal of leeway to the President to enforce them, but the ultimate control of a meeting rests in the group as a whole; those in charge are merely facilitators. SGA is designed to be run by elected representatives of each house and class, with its decisions executed by students elected by the entire student body. At this critical moment of change in the organization, the Assembly should make sure it stays that way.
