The recent influx of wannabe voters to Student Assembly in the face of a vote on a polarizing issue demonstrates a fatal flaw in the Assembly's rules on how to attain voting rights. Currently the majority of voters in the Assembly are either those who attended three consecutive meetings or those who got a vote by being an "organizational representative." (The Dartmouth Bogglers Union has a vote.) Student Assembly should have infrastructure that at least attempts to promote a representative voting body, but its current constitution makes it easy for a vocal minority to gain a majority in the Assembly.
No body that requires only attendance for voting rights will ever be representative of a population. Both Adam Shpeen '07 and Student Body President Tim Andreadis '07 have demonstrated the Assembly's vulnerability to misrepresentative hijacking. Shpeen did it by stealthily block-rushing the Assembly and Andreadis did so by rallying small organizations to submit representatives for the first time at last week's meeting. Dean of Student Life and Assembly advisor Holly Sateia told The Dartmouth that the students in the Assembly are best fitted to decide "the best way to recruit and obtain membership." Never should the responsibility of deciding who can and cannot vote in such a body be left to those who have a vote and who also have political agendas.
The Dartmouth Editorial Board tossed around various potential improvements. In one proposal, each class would receive a certain number of representatives in the Assembly. Students would wield the exact same number of votes as number of delegates. For example, the Class of 2009 would have 15 representatives and each member of the class could vote for 15 different candidates. This idea would create a problem opposite to that of the status quo: the majority would be overrepresented (a problem that is still better than a minority seeming like a majority).
So we propose two possibilities. The first would allot 15 representatives to each class, but students could only vote for seven delegates. Such a system would prevent the top 15 majority candidates from garnering a majority of votes and instead would ensure that the best majority candidates were elected. Alternatively, the Assembly could adopt the newly implemented election procedures of the Senior Executive Committee. Voters would elect the majority of the Assembly representatives and the elected delegates would thereafter have the responsibility to appoint the remainder of their class' delegation with the expressed purpose of selecting those who can represent the underrepresented.
Neither of these proposals is perfect, but no proposal ever will be. Let's start a dialogue on how to make the Assembly more representative of the Dartmouth student body.
