This past week marked the official end to the annual Central Student Government election cycle and, yet again, the system has shown its weaknesses. After a week of litigation within the University Election Commission, Make Michigan retained the top seats within student government. Overall, voter turnout increased, and all three parties — Make Michigan, The Team and the Defend Affirmative Action Party — utilized a variety of tactics to try and entice voting participation from a largely apathetic student body. That said, voter participation still remained under 25 percent. Furthermore, there were unmistakable problems associated with campaigning throughout this cycle that are sadly only an addition to a long pattern of political pettiness that has become synonymous with CSG elections. If CSG hopes to be taken seriously as an authority on campus, serious reforms are needed.
In recent memory, litigation has become the face of CSG elections. For example, two years ago, a lawsuit filed within the UEC that was flimsy, at best — photographs were used to demonstrate voters were influenced by candidates to vote for a specific party — led to the disqualification of the presidential and vice presidential candidates who received the most votes. Last year, litigation did not affect who won, yet it took five days for election results to be certified— an excessive amount of time.
This year has been no different; both Make Michigan and The Team filed suits charging each other with campaign violations in the hopes of rendering the opposing party disqualified from the election. A party can be disqualified if it accumulates 10 or more demerits, which are handed out by the UEC for election code violations. One of these violations — levied against The Team — resulted in five demerits for dumping water over a chalk advertisement on the Diag supporting Make Michigan, which the UEC qualified as “destruction of campaign materials.” The evidence, in this case, is highly questionable and even if true, the punishment is exhorbitant and unreasonable.
On the other hand, The Team filed a suit against Make Michigan for harvesting 5,719 e-mails through a UPetition called “Crush the Calendar,” which was created by LSA freshman Lauren Siegel, Make Michigan’s campaign manager. However, the UEC ruled it could not find Make Michigan guilty of a violation because “it is possible that she may have reasonably believed that the students to whom she sent promotional e-mails would be more likely than any other student to support Make Michigan.” Thus, in a seemingly clear violation of the CSG code, the UEC decided not to act at all upon this suit because — according to the commission — anyone who signed the “Crush the Calendar” UPetition was somehow more likely to vote for Make Michigan than any other student despite this petition having no affiliation with Make Michigan whatsoever.
Make Michigan also filed a suit against LSA senior Andrew Loeb for harvesting 534 e-mails from the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program. However, the UEC ruled The Team did not violate their harvesting standards. Not only are CSG parties resorting to increasingly undemocratic and time-wasting tactics, but the body responsible for holding candidates and party managers accountable appears to allow elections to go on with questionable rule enforcement.
The demerit system utilized by the UEC needs to be reevaluated. Rather than subjecting an entire party’s qualification to 10 demerits, allocated by the UEC for violations of policy, the demerit system should, instead, be tied to vote accumulation — the more demerits a party receives, the more votes should get deducted from their overall total. Currently, the difference between nine and 11 demerits is the difference between life and death, even though it is relatively easy to accumulate two or more demerits.
Above all else, CSG must return to acting as an apolitical body. Students are turned off by the constant badgering of campaigners and quasi-political rhetoric espoused by candidates across the campus. It is no surprise that voter turnout — even though it increased this year — stands at just 22 percent of the student body.
CSG has an immense capacity to affect students in a positive manner. The onus is now on our new leaders-elect — LSA junior Cooper Charlton, LSA sophomore Steven Halperin and the newly elected representatives — to effectively guide our campus to a new era of student governance, along with a revitalized and professional campaign atmosphere. If this does not happen, the same embarrassing cycle will continue.