Senate debates polling bylaw change

The Student Senate discussed a bylaw change on Wednesday that would provide the Election Commissioner with the discretion to open new polling locations for the upcoming elections.

“The main reason why I brought this up was to definitely increase voter turnout,” Election Commissioner Michael Goldstein said. “Personally, I just think the numbers that we had last year was just sad. We have about 13,000 students at this university, and we really only have about one-tenth of the student population voting.”

According to figures released by the Election Commission, about 744 students voted in last year’s Student Senate election compared to nearly 2,542 students in 2008 — representing a 341-percent decrease in voter turnout from the previous year.

Chris Hansen, the Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity facilitator, said there were several factors that may have contributed to the low voter turnout, including a small pool of candidates running for positions and a sense of apathy from the student population that resulted from the ineffectual operation of the Student Representative Council in 2008.

“There’s no way to prove that one thing was the cause, because it was certainly a multitude of factors that played a role (in the low voter turnout),” Hansen said.

Some of the Senate members voiced their concerns about the bylaw revision by saying it might cause problems in the future if the exact parameters are not precisely written in the bylaws.

“I have a really big problem with this because I don’t believe the election commissioner should be deciding where a polling place should be,” said Maggie Wright, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences representative. “I think it should be spelled out in the bylaws, so we don’t have this grey area.”

Director of Finance Michael Johnston suggested the responsibility be placed on the shoulders of the person appointed to the position.

“The best way to go about it is to put it up to the personal judgment of one person and have that person’s integrity and personal responsibility to govern what is right and have a grievance if he or she did something wrong,” Johnston said.

-- originally published in The Mirror on February 26, 2010