Restoring legitimacy to the SGA.

A look at the new need for reformation of the dorm representative election process.

Ben Morse

Issue date: 4/23/08 Section: Opinions

This year's SGA election for dorm presidents is troubling. Only FOUR of over 20 races for dorm president were contested. SIX dorms had no candidate at all and will not have an elected representative next year. And NO representative will be accountable to his or her electoral constituency next year.
If there is one thing that we should take away from this year's travesty of an SGA election of dorm presidents, then it is the need to take a critical look at how we elect our representatives to the SGA. As the aforementioned facts make obvious, the current system is not working.

Indeed, a basic analysis of our electoral system reveals a major flaw in our Constitutional design. By blading SGA representation to room picks for housing, we fully distort the incentives and motivations to serve in SGA and seriously undermine core democratic principals of voter-choice, competition and accountability in elections.

First, the primary motivation for running for SGA is not a desire to serve the student body but rather a reflection of housing concerns, and consequently our representatives may not be as passionate about bettering the student experience as they should be. Secondly, our flawed electoral system precludes potential candidates from running because their housing concerns will always trump desire to serve the student body on SGA. No matter how great a student's desire to serve the student body and run for SGA, she will not run if she does not want to live in the same dorm the next year. Not only are competition and voter-choice in elections thereby diminished, but we're also missing out on potential talented and passionate SGA representatives who would work hard to better our school. And finally, under our election system, representatives don't represent those who voted for them and are completely unaccountable to those who voted for them. A candidate-form dorm president can run on the grandest of campaign promises without being beholden to them when in office.

It is important to realize that these perverse effects of our Constitutional design operate on a grand scale. Only 20 percent of our dorm-president elections were competitive and almost all dorm representatives run for the room pick as the primary motivation. The very legitimacy of dorm presidents is thrown into question.

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