People who are supposed to be our student leaders displayed an astonishing level of incompetence and disorganization yesterday in matters of Student Association elections. (See Page 1)
The judicial board made the right decision to determine before a runoff was held whether the votes from Dickinson College last week were valid. It would have been a colossal waste of time if voters had come out campus-wide for a run-off that would just have been invalidated a few days later.
The judicial board also was correct to rule in favor of the grievance and require that voting in Dickinson be redone. The SA’s bylaws are explicit regarding voting procedures: voters must sign off on the voting roster.
But what an excruciating process it was to reach the correct decisions.
Members of the Assembly, those in opposition to a re-vote in Dickinson, actually debated what the definition of a signature was. They were actually serious.
Some alleged that a signature didn’t matter because there other ways one could defraud an election — like someone signing a fake signature for someone. That, of course, is terrible logic. Just because there are ways to beat the system, you don’t justify the presence of other correctable mistakes.
And if the SA wanted to check that those signatures weren’t fraudulent, it could. We recommend gathering a random sampling of voters’ signatures and double-checking them with a second sample from the voter. Otherwise, what’s the point of the signatures at all?
The SA could also switch from its antiquated hand-written system to Scantron forms — there must be a few extras lying in the Lecture Hall right next to documents with our Social Security numbers, waiting to be found.
Did those in opposition to the re-vote consider what explicitly going against the SA bylaws would have meant? In legal terms — and we’re just journalists — there’s a matter of “precedent” to consider. What a can of worms that would’ve opened.
We don’t believe the pollsitters in Dickinson were up to no good or trying to swing the election. But we also believe that people need to have full faith an election was conducted properly, or they won’t have full faith in their elected representatives.
The catchphrase of the night was “disenfranchisement,” that Dickinson’s voters were being deprived of some right. They’re not, they’re able to re-vote. The entire campus would have been disenfranchised if the votes had stood.
It never should have taken an emergency meeting for this matter to be resolved. It shouldn’t have taken a grievance to be filed, and the elections committee’s report never should have passed the Assembly. That the campus was on the brink of a runoff election with this matter still in limbo is unacceptable.
Concerning the personal bickering at the Assembly meeting and otherwise — grow up, people! You’re here to represent the students (some of you are paid handsomely to do so), not your own personal problems. It’s almost the end of the year and student government seems to be growing only more factious.
Of course, now there are three other grievances to be resolved, grievances that could alter the outcome of the election in some way. The elections committee, which is not going to wait for the outcome of those grievances, better hope that another re-vote isn’t necessary.
So, congratulations to the student government. It took until 2 a.m. today to get matters mostly right. But that fact alone should be telling of how poorly things are going in the SA and Assembly.