With Student Government Association elections less than a week away, Elon University students are being encouraged to support their classmates running for executive positions by exercising one of their basic rights: the right to vote. The online voting process is open to all Elon students, an opportunity SGA hopes many students will take advantage of as part of their renewed goal to increase student participation in campus events and issues.
But during recent interviews with The Pendulum, several executive members of SGA offered contrasting views as to students’ eligibility to vote. If SGA, an organization whose self-reported goal of becoming more "transparent" and accessible to students, wants to bring out more voters, it is imperative that all leaders are on the same page.
In a recent interview with The Pendulum, Rachel Long, executive vice president, explained that the prerequisites for students running for office differ significantly from those that determine voter eligibility. “The way I understand it is that you can run based on your class only, but you vote based on your credit hours,” she said.
Sam Warren, the current SGA executive president, also agreed with Long’s version of the election policy.
So, according to this system, Elon students are eligible to represent only one class, but depending on their credit hours earned, they are technically allowed to vote for a student in an entirely different class year. This system seems backward, as students who have the desire to actively participate in student elections won’t be interested in voting if their only options involve choosing a candidate who is running for a position representing a different class.
Long said her experience with the election system was substantial, thus ensuring no major discrepancies.
“I feel like I’ve always been running or on elections committee so I’m pretty familiar with the process,” she said. Long went on to explain that the software used by SGA to facilitate the voting process is designed to only accommodate the system she described.
“Dean (Patterson) has mentioned that however the software works out, it has to be purely the year you entered Elon or your credit hours — you can’t figure it out both ways,” she said.
Patterson, assistant vice president for Student Life, also offered The Pendulum insight into students’ voting eligibility. According to Patterson, students vote and run based solely on the term in which they matriculate. That is to say, students vote and run for office depending on when they first arrived at Elon. Rising seniors would include any student who entered Elon from summer 2009 through spring 2010. Rising juniors would include those who entered Elon during summer 2010 through spring 2011, and so on.
Grant De Roo, co-chair of the SGA elections committee, confirmed that students vote according to the provisions that Patterson outlined.
That’s quite a departure from the executive council's version. To the average person, it would seem appropriate to think that Patterson’s account is the factual one, given her role as dean and SGA faculty adviser. But if this is the case, why wasn’t this information passed on to our SGA student officials? Even if it is just a simple case of miscommunication, isn’t it fair to expect our elected student officials to be familiar with the policies that they were chosen to uphold?
It seems that SGA doesn’t currently have the required understanding of the democratic process it is supposed to be upholding. Students should exercise their right to vote based on their understanding of the available information, not misinformation. If SGA wants to increase student involvement in their organization in the future, they must first make sure that miscommunication between its members is not a factor.
[box] Editor's Note: Follow-up with SGA representatives indicates Dean Jana Lynn Patterson's explanation of the voting process is correct. Student run and vote based on the term in which they matriculate. [/box]