Correction appended
The College's Association of Alumni announced Thursday that an Election Reform Study Committee has been formed to assess whether current campaign rules should be modified for Board of Trustee elections and Association Executive Committee elections. The announcement comes in anticipation of the next Board election, which is slated to take place in Spring 2010.
The committee was established in response to increased spending observed in recent campaigns for the alumni-elected positions on the Board, Association President John Mathias '69, who is also a member of the new committee, said in an interview with The Dartmouth. In the last Board election, which occurred in 2007, candidates "had to" spend nearly $200,000 in the course of their campaigns, Mathias said.
The escalating cost of elections is cause for "grave concern" in the future, he said.
"It's a huge amount of money to be diverted from other uses, including, but not limited to, money given to Dartmouth," he said. "If you're inclined to spend money at all, I would certainly rather direct it to Dartmouth College than to the U.S. Postal Service [to send promotional campaign material] or vendors to make phone calls for you."
The committee plans to review data from the last several elections as it decides what recommendations to make, Mathias said. It has already begun surveying alumni about whether they believe past campaign conduct has been desirable. The committee might ask, for example, if the slate of potential candidates should be limited to those with significant fundraising potential or enough funds to support their own campaigns.
"Should the next trustee candidate have to spend $50,000 of their own money or $100,000 of their own money to have any chance of winning?" Mathias said. "What if you spend ... your own money and you lose? It gets very personal when it involves the candidates themselves." The Board is made up of two types of trustees, those elected by alumni and those selected by the Board directly. The Alumni Council nominates candidates for the alumni-elected positions, but in recent years, a growing number of petition candidates has been running in the elections. In the past four elections, with candidate spending growing, petition candidates, who have historically been more critical of the College's administration and policies, have triumphed over the Council-selected candidates.
The review also follows structural changes to the trustee election process aimed at simplifying the procedure, former Council President John Daukas, Jr. '84 said. The changes, passed in May, included a provision stating that the Council must submit one or two candidates instead of three for a Trustee position and the regulations to give each alumnus only one vote, which would hypothetically make it easier for Council-backed candidates to win, since they have historically split the vote of like-minded alumni.
A review of finance regulations was expected to follow the election changes that were made in May, The Dartmouth previously reported.
Questionnaires have already been e-mailed to alumni, Mathias said, and the committee has thus far received about 300 replies. Mathias said he hopes the committee will have received the last feedback from alumni by the end of September, to allow the executive committee to make any desired rule changes in time for the December start of Board election campaigning.
A meeting to discuss the issue will also be held in Hanover, likely in September, he said.
Daukas said he would prefer to see an election system in which alumni did not need large financial backing in order to be viable candidates. Use of e-mail or College publications, such as Dartmouth Life, to disseminate information about candidates would also be preferable to extensive campaign spending, he said.
"I think that's probably a better way than, say, buying an advertisement in The New York Times," he added.
Others have charged, however, that the review proposal is motivated by a desire to stifle debate among candidates. Former trustee Todd Zywicki '88 said in an interview that the committee's information-gathering is merely a pretense, charging that the Committee has already decided upon the spending changes. In April, Zywicki was not re-elected to a second term on the Board, a process which has historically been routine.
The questions posed to alumni are heavily biased, Zywicki noted, leading alumni to support changes to rules on campaign spending. This suggests that the committee does not seek meaningful input, he said.
The survey posted on the Association's blog includes questions on whether money should factor into the election, and whether reform should be made.
"Should candidates in alumni trustee and/or [the Association's Executive Committee] elections have to raise or spend a substantial amount of money campaigning to have any realistic chance of winning," the survey asks.
The changes will in turn put petition candidates at a structural disadvantage compared to Council-selected candidates.
"They have no basis for believing that money, for instance, makes any difference in trustee elections," Zywicki said. "Basically ... one side has virtually unlimited resources of the College to spend promoting one slate of candidates, while the other side does not have that advantage."
Constricting funding options would make it more difficult to field petition candidates, he said, making the funding issue ultimately a question of whether alumni are allowed to run as petition candidates. As a result, the finance reform will ultimately be about whether alumni can express their opinions about the College freely.
"It's pretty clear where they want to go is back to the old days, when elections for trustees were substantively empty popularity contests," Zywicki said. "They're going to try and tighten things up even more to try to make trustee elections as vapid as possible."
Trustee T. J. Rodgers '70, agreeing with Zywicki, described the committee's presentation of the issues as "phony" and the petition candidate nomination process as a "vicious cycle," in which candidates are forced to gather 500 signatures to run in the election, which in turn requires them to spend money.
"I think this [questionnaire] is designed to prevent the problem unfairly, and the reaction is going to be the one they've rigged the question to produce," Rodgers said. "That's the part of this that's dishonest."
Mathias said that the committee is willing to expand debate on the issue as much as necessary in order to see if broad support for changes actually exists.
"We certainly don't want to shut anyone out," Mathias said. "We'd like to have as much input as possible for this issue, which is a thorny one."
The current review is confined in focus to the funding issue, he noted. While alumni are free to bring up subsequent issues in the course of discussion, these will likely be held off for a subsequent review period.
This distinction is important, Mathias noted, because unlike previous rounds of reform, the current committee does not intend to make changes to the campaign process or to try to limit in which kinds of campaigning candidates may engage.
"It's very hard to draw a line, to say what you can and cannot do, as far as campaigning is concerned," he said. "Theoretically, you could come up with some restrictions that might have teeth, but there are practical problems with enforcing them, or even understanding them or articulating them."
The committee itself will not make a decision about rule changes, Mathias said. Rather, it will submit recommendations to the Association's executive committee, which has the authority to vote on the rules governing campaign conduct, he said.
The committee consists of Veree Hawkins Brown '93, the Association's first vice president; Daukas; David Spalding '76, Association secretary-treasurer and the College vice president for alumni relations; Mathias; and Ronald Schram '64 and Ronald Harris '71, members of the Association's executive committee, according to the Association's blog.
