Student Body President Julia Hildreth '05 began Tuesday night's Student Assembly meeting by briefly addressing the dismissal of Brian Martin '06 from the committee chair post to which he was confirmed last week.
The Assembly went on to vote down proposed amendments that would have eased constitutional changes and allowed instant-runoff voting in elections for student body president.
Hildreth assured members of the General Assembly that the executive committee "never meant for you to be out of the loop" during her remarks about Martin's removal from office. She invited anyone else who was interested in more information about the decision to talk to her during her Wednesday office hours.
The Assembly later confirmed Noah Riner '06 to take Martin's place as the Assembly's vice president for alumni affairs.
Although he said he thought Martin would have done a good job, Ralph Davies '05, who stepped down from leading the committee last week, said, "I can't emphasize enough [that] Noah was my first choice because he was inside."
"I am psyched to lead the committee into greatness," Riner said after expressing his regret for the circumstances that opened the chair up for him.
Assembly executives voted to sack Martin in a closed-door meeting Monday night after an alleged leak to The Dartmouth about the 34 new BlitzMail computers installed early this week around campus.
Hildreth recognized treasurer Chris Bertrand '07 and president's assistant Lucas Nikkel '05 for spearheading the BlitzMail terminal project. Bertrand reported that the project was almost $1000 under budget.
Adam Shpeen '07 and Assembly secretary Dax Tejera '07 co-sponsored an amendment to decrease the three-quarters majority necessary to pass future amendments to the Assembly's constitution to a two-thirds majority. The measure failed.
Shpeen said he co-sponsored the amendment because of the delays that have plagued recent meetings in which an unusually large amount of legislation has been introduced. Shpeen said a two-thirds majority would be easier to reach.
"It's not because I'm trying to lax the rules," Shpeen said, but that the constitution's three-quarters rule has ceased to be appropriate.
At last week's meeting, Tejera left the room to retrieve a member in order to achieve quorum for a vote.
Tejera is a member of The Dartmouth staff.
Russell Lane '06 noted that requiring a three-quarters majority to pass legislation is "almost pigeonholing people to say 'yes' just because they're the person to make it three-quarters of the group." In recent meetings a bare three-quarters of the Assembly's voting members have shown up, meaning that nearly all would have to vote in favor of amendments in order for them to pass.
Davies spoke out in opposition to the amendment.
"We need to rethink in a lot of ways what we're doing in SA right now," Davies said.
"We're focusing so much on the things that are happening within SA," he added, explaining that the Assembly has not been focusing enough on larger issues on campus.
Had the two-thirds amendment passed, the voting rules amendment that followed it would have passed as well. Instead, it was four votes shy of the 45 required.
The amendment would have instituted instant-runoff voting for Assembly elections in the spring, in which voters would have ranked the candidates on their ballots. If no candidate achieved a majority of first-choice votes, the votes of those who selected the last-place candidate would have been redistributed to those voters' next-highest choice, and so on, until one candidate wins a majority.
Davies, who lost the Assembly presidency last spring by a single vote, said the new system would confuse students and deter them from voting.
"I was always against this, and I'm probably the person who would've benefited most from this," Davies said.
"If they don't care enough to vote then we don't want them voting anyway," Tatyana Liskovich '08 said of students who could be discouraged from voting because of the more complex system.
Liskovich added that Dartmouth students should be able to understand it without difficulty.
Cyrus Attia '08 also supported the amendment, which he said would have increased student involvement and given voice to their true intentions.
"In light of recent events, the voter turnout's going to be kind of higher anyway," Attia said.
David Hankins '05 was confirmed as head of the Elections Planning and Advisory Committee, which was set up at last week's Assembly meeting to administer campus-wide elections for the Assembly, class councils, Green Key Society, the Committee on Standards and the Organizational Adjudication Committee.
At the end of the meeting, Jacques Hebert '07 was also confirmed to lead Dartmouth's chapter of the Ivy Council, and Erin Johnson '08 was confirmed as the Assembly's community service coordinator.
