SGA amends constitution, encounters delays
After passing a new constitution in the middle of spring semester, the newly renamed Student Government Association (SGA) passed a set of bylaws on Tuesday that now allows them to operate fully.
The constitution was written in a way that forced the SGA to convene twice before it could officially pass the bylaws and form the committees that carry out its operations. This bureaucratic delay, along with SGA's decision to reestablish the Committee on Student Elections (CSE), would officially push the freshman elections into late October.
However, at Tuesday's SGA meeting, the members voted to form an ad-hoc committee that will allow the election to occur within a minimum of about three weeks.
Members have acknowledged that this process has been artificially expedited, but that it is important that the freshmen do not continue to go without representation in student government. Additionally, some of the newly formed SGA committees would be effectively defunct without the freshman representatives required to make quorum.
According to several SGA members, the delays in freshman elections and general bylaw reassessments have made for a rocky start to the fall semester.
"The new constitution was designed to be a running document and it doesn't outline any stipulations for the start-up, so obviously there are going to be growing pains," SGA President Prasanna Chandrasekhar.
"The problem is that we've never started this much from scratch before, so when it comes to things like how to run a freshman election, it might seem a little disorganized," he said.
This will be the first election since last spring, when the executive council elections suffered from complications that resulted in the disqualification of all nine candidates. Some of these candidates were disqualified because they continued to campaign after the official voting period had commenced, which is explicitly against the rules. The CSE facilitated a reelection in the wake of the first election, in which many of the same candidates ran.
The constitution was written in a way that forced the SGA to convene twice before it could officially pass the bylaws and form the committees that carry out its operations. This bureaucratic delay, along with SGA's decision to reestablish the Committee on Student Elections (CSE), would officially push the freshman elections into late October.
However, at Tuesday's SGA meeting, the members voted to form an ad-hoc committee that will allow the election to occur within a minimum of about three weeks.
Members have acknowledged that this process has been artificially expedited, but that it is important that the freshmen do not continue to go without representation in student government. Additionally, some of the newly formed SGA committees would be effectively defunct without the freshman representatives required to make quorum.
According to several SGA members, the delays in freshman elections and general bylaw reassessments have made for a rocky start to the fall semester.
"The new constitution was designed to be a running document and it doesn't outline any stipulations for the start-up, so obviously there are going to be growing pains," SGA President Prasanna Chandrasekhar.
"The problem is that we've never started this much from scratch before, so when it comes to things like how to run a freshman election, it might seem a little disorganized," he said.
This will be the first election since last spring, when the executive council elections suffered from complications that resulted in the disqualification of all nine candidates. Some of these candidates were disqualified because they continued to campaign after the official voting period had commenced, which is explicitly against the rules. The CSE facilitated a reelection in the wake of the first election, in which many of the same candidates ran.
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Kate Jacob
posted 9/21/08 @ 9:31 PM EST
I do not recall saying that the CSE would act a certain way, obviously there is no way to tell how a committee that has no members yet will act. I do remember saying, both in the SGA meeting and to the Newsletter, that just because some candidates broke the rules, does not mean that those rules are illegitimate. (Continued…)
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