Attendance: Maria, Jorge, Kelly, Ethan, Thea, Emma, Anagha, Yasmin, Stefan, Grant, Michael, Grace, Vy, Julia, Julie, Kabir, Erin, Mattias, Emmeline, Yuriko, Irene, Jesse
Agenda:
- Retreat
- Election Guidelines Voting
Election Guideline Voting
Jorge: Welcome to our first meeting of the semester. We just finished our retreat. We only have one thing, presenting the election guidelines. This came after an issue with elections when we realized we had no guidelines. We want to have transparency.
Maria: These are the election guidelines written with guidance of the election coordinators. The first part is related to funding, in which you can’t use personal funds. Poster policy, people cannot poster over others. We attached the poster policy. Then we have the election statements, and we reiterated that people have to be respectful in their statements.StuCo involvement, StuCo members can campaign as individuals, but not as their positions. They cannot share internal information that would help elections. Finally, election coordinators cannot be permitted to share total votes with outside sources. I would like some feedback on this part. How often do we feel like those have to be voted on by StuCo?
Vy: Every semester makes sense because we are rerunning the elections every semester. I have to go so I will vote in favor.
Emmeline: I have a question about 2 in the last section. Is it unfair if they say that no one is running? They sometimes say no one is running and encourage others to run?
Maria: I think in general almost any internal information gives an advantage.
Ethan: Information like that becomes public once it’s closed. If no one runs, we tell people that. Generally, if you have to be an election coordinator to know the information, don’t share that information.
Michael: If it is a situation where no one else is running and you think you know someone who would be good for the position you can just encourage them to run but not tell them that piece of information.
Grant: Two things, for point 3 under StuCo involvement, it should be more general about any information about elections not just vote totals. Second, in regards to the election statements and bringing concerts to election coordinators or honor council. It is kind of unclear what happens if someone were to bring a concern. What could the election coordinators or honor council do?
Michael: It has to be decided case by case, I don’t think a policy could account for everything. Do you have ideas?
Grant: No, it may just be something we want to look at when editing the constitution, like what power election coordinators have in solving disputes.
Ethan: We discussed this at Exec Board, we don’t want consequences for this reason. Honor council can enforce things. The current constitutional wording is if there is a concern about a candidate statement the election coordinators at their discretion can tell someone to change it but they are not required.
Anagha: If someone is spreading misinformation through their candidate statement, they should have to change it and still run. Just to preserve the integrity of StuCo. I don’t think someone should be running and slandering StuCo in their statement, they can point out improvements but not being mean.
Erin: Or promising things that simply cannot happen and are not written into the constitution for that role.
Maria: I hear you, this is kinda how elections are. Politicians do this. It’s going to be very hard to decide what we determine as misinformation or not.
Anagha: Like if there is information that is just wrong like when a candidate says they can do something within a position that they actually cannot do.
Ethan: This is why you campaign. If your opponent is lying, put up posters.
Jorge: I really discourage writing what we cannot do in a document. Exec Board should be able to have people retract statements.
Ethan: That’s what it is right now for the election coordinators in the Exec Board.
Maria: I don’t want to add the Exec Board, Elections Coordinators are the most unbiased group. The Honor Council is there in case something violates the honor code.
Michael: I would also add to Ethan’s point that we want to emphasize campaigning in future elections. It is just as important if not more important to determine your success than a statement.
Jorge: Both are important, writing the statement is a part of campaigning.
Grant: I think policing peoples statements can get very sketchy. In terms of violations, we had a two strike policy. I don’t if we want to do something
Thea: In the new email policy we took a snippet from the Honor Code and laws about discrimination. If you guys want to put that in.
Julie: I feel like candidates saying things that they cannot do is something that should be looked over because there were people who wanted to vote for an idea that is not allowed.
Maria: That responsibility falls on the informant of that role. We want to have a town hall with Exec Board and we explain what we do. We also want to write descriptions to be more accurate too. That will fall more on ourselves clarifying positions.
Jorge: I want to encourage Michael to make changes, if you think there needs to be changes to the election coordinators role that can be added to the StuCo resolution. We are appointing a new election coordinator, the two of you can really get into that.
Michael: An idea I had, is the candidate statement could be read by the person in the role currently.
Maria: We have people rerun quite often. So that’s a conflict of interest. We have two options, do we workshop it for one more week, or vote now?
*agreement to vote now*
Maria: All those in favor please raise your hand?
Maria: Not in favor.
Maria: Abstaining
*election guidelines pass unanimously*
Maria: Meeting adjourned, thank you.
Special thanks to Students’ Council Co-Secretaries Emma Almo ’25 and Thea Schwallie ’25 for providing The Clerk with the meeting minutes.
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