You should care about your Student Government because you pay $16.06 per credit hour, about $385 a year if you are a full-time undergraduate or $289 if you are a graduate student. SG’s $18.2 million budget comes entirely from the students, but it’s not run by the students themselves. No one is really at fault. The “winner-take-all” or “first-past-the-post” elections facilitate a two-party system that is not very representative of the Student Body’s interests. As a result, students feel disenfranchised, turnout for SG elections is dismal and the cycle perpetuates itself.
If SG really wanted to be representative of all the students, parties would not worry about having a certain number of minorities in their parties. They would amend the SG Constitution to establish “proportional representation” in its elections. This percentage-based rule allocates the number of seats a party wins based on the number of votes cast. For example, in running for a block of six Senate seats, like in the CLAS Bloc, if party A received 50 percent of the votes, party B got 30 percent and party C had 20 percent, then party A would get three Senate seats, party B two seats and party C one seat. The system itself would be more representative of students’ interests by letting more students organize into parties, compete in fair elections and hold offices in SG. Students would feel empowered because they would get what they vote for.
Changing the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority vote in Senate, and the current party in power has no incentive to change the election rule because it would make way for more political participation in the system. The Students Party is committed to changing this rule but cannot do so unless it wins the election Wednesday. Last year, it lost the executive race by only 114 votes. If the Students Party wins this year, it will have the necessary numbers in Senate and the support of the executive. The best part of changing the election rule to proportional representation is once the Senate has more political parties, it will be much harder to get the two-thirds majority to change it back — it will be a lasting solution.
Victor M. Olivieri is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science and a Students Party Senate candidate. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
