Does anyone else find it strange that the people on the Elections Planning and Advisory Committee -- responsible for ensuring fair elections and thus charged with neutrality in determining sanctions for possible rule violations -- are themselves from Student Assembly?
I was on EPAC last year, when it was run by Palaeopitus with representatives from other organizations. It felt like we got nearly a dozen complaints a night that someone was violating the campaigning rules in some way or other. We would investigate though it was usually impossible to tell what had happened. Or it was clear what had happened but absolutely shocking how petty the violations were -- people would report poster violations when there was less than a centimeter of overlap covering just the white border of someone's poster. One incident that will stick in my memory forever was when I went to investigate someone's poster allegedly having been torn down. I realized it could never have been there in the first place because there were no tack-holes in the paper of the board on which it had been supposedly posted! I was thoroughly disheartened and disgusted by elections last year and by the underhanded ways many candidates tried to get an edge. Elections are downright dirty and much goes on behind the scenes that students never hear about. I had to turn to my friends to comfort me, never able to share any specifics of what had happened but just so outright disappointed in the pettiness that our would-be student body leaders displayed. Is this process something that you want Assembly to run? When there are so many reported violations and it is so hard to tell what is going on, isn't there a chance that during some long, complicated dispute between candidates over an alleged rule violation someone on EPAC might think to himself "well, I have known X for 3 years from serving on Assembly with him. I do not think he would have done this," and have that somewhat bias the determination of guilt?
Let me be clear -- I personally trust the current EPAC members completely and I think they can maintain neutrality. However, I think it is important for the credibility of EPAC for it to not come from the Assembly in the future. This year things might be going fine. There seem to be few sanctions, so maybe few violations are being reported (although last year for every 20 alleged violations, we found guilt and sanctioned in maybe just 1 of those cases, and the rest nobody ever heard of). But if Assembly keeps running EPAC year after year, chances are that sometime or other someone will not keep to their assigned neutrality. To be fair, Assembly does not have a lot of influence on EPAC right now as it is. EPAC is currently comprised of: 1) the non-voting chair, who is the president of the Assembly if he or she is a senior, the '05 Class Council president if he or she is not and someone appointed if neither of those people is interested; 2) a member appointed by Assembly; 3) a member appointed by '05 Class Council; 4) a member appointed by Palaeopitus; 5) a member appointed by Green Key Society. This is not an extremely dire situation, then -- the Assembly actually only has one vote. However, the Assembly has two of the five people who are present in the sometimes intense discussions on whether or not someone has broken the rules and if so, how severely to sanction. And that still strikes me as too much influence, because I know much gets said in these discussions.
I figured EPAC was moved from Palaeopitus to Assembly for a reason, so I tried to find that reason. After much effort, I found that the reason is that Assembly members have more experience with elections. This is a valid concern -- after all, to draw up good election rules it helps to have first-hand experience with elections and how they work -- however, the same goal could be accomplished perhaps by having someone who was involved with EPAC the year before be around to offer advice. At least Assembly could compromise and get rid of their voting member in the future, say, maybe putting in another spot for a junior from some other organization.
I offer no conclusions as to where EPAC should move. There are plenty of places which would be worse for it to move to, e.g. a group of self-selected students who probably have their own personal interest in running the elections because of their biases. Presumably, some better group could be found. I really hope something does change, because as it stands I still worry somewhat about credibility of EPAC in the future.
