Student Government passed a vote of confidence by a one-vote margin to allow the Student Elections Commission to run elections this fall Tuesday night at an emergency SG meeting.
Twelve senators voted in favor of the SEC running this fall’s upcoming elections, and 11 senators opposed. There were no abstentions in the vote.
“I was surprised by the vote, to be honest … That it was so close,” said Cherice Hunt, SG’s director of communication. “I thought there might have been a majority either way.”
Hunt, a College of Communication junior, said the SEC did well in presenting their case.
“I understand where they come from in terms of time constraints,” Hunt said. “Those time constraints, I can imagine, are going to be very difficult. I think they’ve been working really hard so far. Time will tell.”
While Hunt said she supports the SEC, not all SG members said they have the same confidence.
“Their performance last year was quite poor,” said Jonathan Donald, one of SG’s judicial commissioners. “There’s no doubt about that.”
Donald, a College of Arts and Sciences senior, said the SEC’s campaign was not worse than in previous years.
“The fact that we only had one slate run made people believe that it was SEC’s job to turn out enthusiasm for people to run,” he said.
Donald, SEC’s contact with SG, ran the SEC as an interim co-chair with Tess McNamara, current co-chair of the SEC, until she felt confident enough to take control, and bring it into a true third-party institution.
“Since then, I sit on all the meetings with the SEC, I am cc’ed in almost all the contact info between members, I’m brought in on budget meetings — everything that goes on from flyer purchases to when the posters go up to who meets with AdClub,” Donald said.
Donald added that anyone in Cabinet or the Senate can come talk to him about that, but said there does need to be another mechanism by which the Senate can getting directly informed.
“I’m not sure that’s the judicial commission’s purpose. I don’t know what that mechanism is yet, but I think there needs to be a mechanism for Senate and the general public to get awareness on SEC,” Donald said.
McNamara said the SEC mainly wanted to stress to SG that the SEC is a new group of people.
“We want to have open communication,” McNamara, a School of Education sophomore, said. “We are open for suggestions. We want to have absolutely the least amount of friction as possible. We want to bring SEC up and make it known that we can do the job.”
The SEC was tasked with organization election information sessions on a very tight schedule, McNamara said.
“Given that maybe we could have gotten a little bit more marketing for the information sessions, look at what we did do in a week with a new group of people,” she said.
The emergency meeting was scheduled after SEC members were unable to attend the original meeting, which took place Oct. 1.
“It wasn’t because we just didn’t feel like coming [to the Oct. 1 meeting],” McNamara said. “We actually had other obligations and we were notified really last minute.”
In the 2011–12 academic year SG passed an amendment saying elections will be held each fall instead of in the spring. While SG passed a vote of confidence in the SEC, they also motioned to have a judicial review of the past amendment.
The Senate proposed that the judicial committee review the amendment that was made last year that changed the election cycle. The motion passed, and the judicial committee agreed to take action.
“We’ll look at the way that vote was conducted, if there were any proxies and misuse of proxies,” Donald said. “Second, if that vote was done constitutionally, we can make a recommendation to Senate on how to handle that.”
Donald said SG will begin investigating the amendment imminently.
“We’re hoping to have it done by the next Senate meeting,” he said. “We’d love to present our findings then.”
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