MD

News

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Advertise with us »

CSG continues discussion of new election code

By Giacomo Bologna, Daily Staff Reporter
Published October 31, 2012

On Tuesday night, the Central Student Government assembly passed what could be the last piece of legislation related to the historic 2012 CSG election.

Despite heavy discussion at the previous meeting, the revising of a 15-page resolution that replaces the previous election code prompted only one question before being unanimously passed.

The assembly also added a provision to clarify that parties can donate to individual campaigns, despite individual limits. Legislators also fixed typos in the original resolution.

Law student Jeremy Keeney, the rules committee chair, said the legislation is an improvement from prior plans for reform.

“It’s not perfect, but the campaign finance section is definitely a huge step from where we were,” Keeney said in an address to the assembly.

In an interview after the meeting, Keeney explained that the reformed legislation offers campaigns flexibility.

“The party allows all the candidates to pool their resources if they want,” he said. “So if they were running a president and four candidates then they would have a total of twelve hundred (dollars) that they could sort of pool.”

However, Keeney acknowledged there isn’t legislation that mandates donated funds be specifically differentiated by whom the money was donated to, meaning there is gray area in regards to what constitutes money spent on party advertisements versus advertisements for specific candidates.

“It’s just going to come down to interpretation,” he said and added that a properly formatted donations disclosure form could likely resolve any confusion.

The assembly also handled two items of old business. LSA senior Melissa Burns, the LSA student government vice president, came to speak on behalf of a resolution to include cyber bullying as an infraction of the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities for the second consecutive year.

Burns said LSA-SG and the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center have already supported similar measures. Shortly thereafter, CSG followed suit, passing the resolution unanimously.

The other resolution, calling for a for a student organization-wide events calendar was passed nearly unanimously with the lone nay vote from Engineering representative Andrew Modell. Modell said his vote was no indication of how he felt about the gist of the resolution, as he supports the idea, but doesn’t agree with the technical wording of the bill.

While many resolutions concern changing the atmosphere or opinion in the room, Public policy senior and representative Forrest Cox penned a resolution proposing physical changes to the white-walled CSG chambers.

Ideas considered included more white board space, new chairs and more space, as well as a taskforce to look into possible renovations.

In another resolution he authored, Cox also called for more Wi-Fi throughout campus, and particularly in the Diag.

In response to questions from Modell about the potential cost of a project like this, Cox said the purpose of the resolution would be more to make a taskforce to look into the plausibility of installing Wi-Fi across campus.

Correction appended: A previous version of this article misrepresented language of the resolution regarding endorsements made by members of CSG.


|