Erik Paulson's Blog

This is just as a quick update to the two earlier posts. At today’s council meeting, the ASM Student Council adopted a change that will require referenda to ask separate questions and a new definition of freshmen for fall elections. Neither change is official, bylaw changes require votes at two meetings before they take effect.

The separate questions change passed easily, with little discussion. I didn’t expect that it would be terribly controversial.

The new student voting question was a long and good discussion. In the end, we settled on “option one”, which would define freshman to be a ‘First Year Student’. If it had been in place in 2008, 694 students would have been included in the fall 2008 election. We expect the number to be similar for 2009.

It’s important to note that while change we set out to make today only effects first year students, we spent a long time exploring options to help transfer students and new graduate/professional students. However, the consensus in the room was that there were simply too many obstacles to attempt a change in the bylaws without also making a constitutional change, and that an on-the-fly constitutional change was ill-advised. It took a lot of persuading (or, just doggedly wearing down) many council members to even start on a bylaw change without more time to consider the ramifications.

The next step is to confirm option one at the September 2nd council meeting. If we are still comfortable with the change, it can become official at that meeting. If there are still concerns, the council may delay, with final adoption on September 16th, or else push the change out and fix it in time for the 2010 fall election.

The council did seem committed to trying to do something for transfer students and new grad students, potentially in time for the fall of 2009, but I suspect it won’t happen until 2010. As we get into proposed fixes, any thread we pull on will quickly unravel the whole thing into a big pile of problems.

One of the ideas that was discussed was moving some of the elections to the fall. There are two fundamental problems with moving away from a spring election. The first is the easier of the two: many of the ASM efforts for an upcoming year benefit from having a summer to prepare for it. It is better to have a new council start in the spring, and be energized for an upcoming fall than to give the summer over to an outgoing council that has no stake in the upcoming year. The real killer is the logistics of the SSFC process: the SSFC needs to be set, as much as possible, during the summer so they can train and organize for the fall. September and October are the middle of the eligibility hearings for student groups. It simply could not work to have major turnover and many new members in the fall.

I think the whole ASM council seat allocation process is flawed. Beyond the problem of thousands of students having no vote in the fall, the whole idea of districts based on college just doesn’t seem right. Who really says “I’m an L&S student?” There is no real connection between most council members and their ‘constituents’. (If you’re an L&S student, which one of the 12 is ‘your’ representative?) In the spring of 2008, the person I most wanted to vote onto the council was Adam Porton, but he wasn’t on my ballot. (In fact, there was only one person on my ballot, the other 4 grad seats had no one running for them).

Seat allocation and election timing is a complicated problem. On the constitution committee last year, we spent many hours trying different ideas, and ultimately we just left the system as-is. Maybe this year we can do better.

(The rest of the meeting was fast and smooth, except for starting 40 minutes late because we were one short for quorum. We appointed Tom Templeton to the Madison Inititiave Oversight Shared Gov committee, Katy Ziebell to SSFC, fine-tuned the press office job descriptions, endorsed a United Council event that will happen in Madison, and OK’ed a large-but-routine event grant for a World Music Festival the Union is sponsoring.)