9 Comments
fix things Ben, you gotta
Earlier tonight, Bwog was tipped about various members of CCSC, ESC, and GSSC voicing concerns about the Columbia Political Union’s newfound influence over the upcoming student council election process.
The Columbia Elections Board (CEB), which was founded in 2013 “to conduct and publicize student council elections on campus,” is currently made up of four students, according to the CCSC Spring 2016 Elections Packet, of whom two are on the executive board of the Columbia Political Union (CPU). Given CEB’s founding just a couple years ago, CPU’s exact relationship with the group remains largely unclear to the student body.
According to Adil Mughal, CC ’17, CEB “might disqualify a quarter of the candidates, and they aren’t letting more people register.” If the Elections Board follows through with this action, CPU will essentially have control over this year’s ballot. There are currently seven positions on CCSC with candidates running uncontested, as well as eight positions on ESC and four positions on GSSC, both of which also contain an open seat on the University Senate.
In order to mitigate the number of candidates running for positions uncontested, student councils hope to allow students to re-register in parties. Mughal went on to clarify that “because you have to have a President and Vice President running together on the same ticket, [CEB] may disqualify the students running against CCSC 2017 candidates Jordana Narin/Brennon Mendez. The Elections Board didn’t specify that rule to candidates registering.”
Councils also took issue with the way CEB handled promotion of this year’s election registration. Because of past criticisms over student government exclusivity, councils were looking to expand their reach in the undergraduate community by encouraging a larger number of students to run this year. They believe CEB did a poor job of promoting candidate registration to the student body, inconsistently posting in different class-specific Facebook groups and failing to publish the registration link to their official Facebook page until hours before registration closed.
According to Mughal, CPU’s Membership Director “refuses to admit that the [Columbia Elections Board] did anything wrong, and thinks that [re-]opening registration is too much of a hassle.”
Update (11:51 pm): The original post contained misinformation from Spectator, which falsely reported that CEB chose not to use the University Senate listserv to share registration information for the first time.
Update (4/30, 11:03 pm): Emails from CPU have attempted to clarify the relationship between CPU and CEB; apparently, there have been no changes to the election process, but CPU has been hosting information about the elections on CEB’s behalf in order to promote civic engagement. CPU’s role is “purely publicity,” while we are told CEB is completely in charge of running the election, and is independent of CPU.
Fix it Ben via Ben’s Facebook
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9 Comments
@fyi the student running against Jordana Narin is being disqualified not just because he doesn’t have a VP candidate, but also because he is currently also running for sandwich ambassador
@Anonymous wait seriously tho does anyone care except for wannabe journalists looking for stories?
@concerned but did you go to the jschool fam
@Viv Hi all, I wanted to provide more information (also check out Spec’s article http://columbiaspectator.com/news/2016/03/29/council-presidents-concerned-columbia-elections-board-inadequately-promoted-council) given what I know. Columbia Elections Board is an autonomous body (though appointed by council) with full control over decisions regarding registration, deadlines, etc. Ben reached out to CEB on the morning of last Tuesday (which turned out to be the registration deadline by chance) because we could not find any elections registration link or deadline info on the CEB Facebook page, and the CEB email address from last year had bounced. In response, CEB provided the link and said they had posted it on the class Facebook pages. Ben then immediately sent an email Tuesday afternoon to the CC student body with the election registration info.
Additionally, we then asked CEB to re-open the registration to extend the deadline because members of the student councils had relayed concerns from several students who said they didn’t know about the registration — the presidents of both ESC and GSSC agreed with the need to re-open the process. The head of CEB responded by saying that “it doesn’t make any sense for us to re-open registration. It’s not fair to our current candidates and it’s not fair for the board to have to put in exponentially more work when we’ve already done what we need to … I understand your concern but we are an autonomous body so we can make this decision ourselves.” That’s when the presidents of all three councils talked to Spec, hoping to draw attention to this. I’m happy Bwog’s also bringing light to it.
I deeply appreciate the time put into this by CEB members and understand reopening the registration creates more work for them. However, there have been enough students complaint about the lack of info/communication (this was publicized only on class Facebook pages, by email to CC students only on the day of the deadline and not to SEAS at all) to suggest it’s a serious issue. Speaking for myself (and not councils), I think the overriding concern here ought to be ensuring that students who want to run for council positions are able to.
@js Bwog, I know what you are trying to say in this article, but it doesn’t have enough explanation to be accessible outside the 5% of the student body that follows this stuff.
@Anonymous Basically they told the general public about running for office the day sign ups were due, then had huge registration “errors,” and let some candidates in. Now half the positions are uncontested and they might disqualify people, making it even worse.
So the election is a mess and maybe even a complete sham.
@Why is Ben not accepting blame for this? He appoints the members of the elections board. If there is an issue with them, that is his fault.
@Anonymous Because he doesn’t control that process closely and he is trying to stop them but the constitution doesn’t let him.
@Anon The EB is separate from CCSC, ESC and GSSC for obvious reasons. The councils don’t hand pick the members of the EB, as a last step for the EB the councils approve appointments made internally by the EB. Appointments have to be approved by all 3 councils, not just CCSC. Even with regard to CCSC specifically, the CCSC President doesn’t even have voting power because according to the constitution he’s supposed to be able to objectively facilitate the vote/discussion. So Ben didn’t even cast a vote to approve them. Also I think most of the current EB were appointed during previous years, not this year.