Palli: New Board must work to improve image among students

After a series of scandals last semester, confidence in Pitt’s Student Government Board, similar to Congress, is extremely low. This is reflected not only in the way people discuss SGB, but also in the incredibly low number of candidates for elected positions.

First, we discovered that former Elections Committee Chairwoman Annie Brown did not pursue a full inquiry into accusations of campaign infractions among the so-called megaslates. Following the proposal of a truce by Forbes slate campaign manager Kate Malekoff, Brown encouraged others to drop all allegations and agree not to make further accusations, saying it would bolster the “integrity of the candidates and SGB as a whole.” On her part, this was an understandable move. Untangling all of the allegations would be nearly impossible, and all the megaslates seemed to have engaged in such behavior. Unfortunately, an underlying assumption here was that the results of full inquiry into the allegation would not affect independent candidates running for Board.

But this should have immediately raised the question of why the megaslates engaged  in such behavior to begin with. Why wasn’t our elections system more fair and transparent?

We have come to expect dirty campaigning, back-door deals and, on occasion, Supreme Court meddling, in our U.S. presidential elections. But this is a college campus. The university is a place of idealism where we strive for knowledge and attempt to determine how we should live our lives.

In such a place, the governing body should reflect these ideals. Student government should be the best government. It should be efficiently run and reflect the will of the students. But most importantly, it should be totally uncorrupted, adhering to the highest possible standards of ethics and morality.

If our elected officials can’t live up to such hopes on a college campus, how can we possibly expect this to hold in city- or state-wide politics, much less national politics? But six of the nine current Board members, including SGB President Gordon Louderback, are members of the secret Druids organization on campus, according to a report published in The Pitt News last spring, revealing that there is reason to be skeptical of their motives in becoming Board members.

Despite its rocky start, the current Board has accomplished a lot this year. Notably, Academic Affairs Chair Nuwan Perera and Board member Thomas Jabro started and gained a large number of signatures on a petition to make OMET results public. Though the logistics of such a system are complicated, Perera and Jabro have demonstrated student support for the tools to decide on worthy classroom experiences.

Unfortunately, the opaque nature of last year’s election has overshadowed the successes of this year’s Board and has destroyed the civics-building that campus politics once entailed. Running a clean, competitive election, thinking on one’s feet and thinking of innovative ways to help the community used to be hallmarks of a candidate’s experience. But after the revelations of the Druids’ dominance of student government at Pitt, it is clear that this is not how the SGB elections were run last year. This year, there are so few candidates running that the election will not provide the sort of proving ground and practice for professional politics that it should.

So how do we fix this problem? How do we restore confidence in the integrity of SGB? Clearly, to restore confidence, we must eliminate the possibility of similar scandals from occurring in the future and create an Elections Code representative of the wishes of the Pitt student body..

To this end, one particular modification to the SGB constitution must be accepted and augmented. A referendum that students can vote on during the Thursday election to only allow students to have three votes for Board seats, rather than the current total of five per voter, is a good step, but does not go nearly far enough. Under the current system, six friends can run for Board and president and have undue influence over Student Government, as the Druids did last year. Under the new system, such a group could only control at most three board seats and the presidency.

But this, though not as dire a situation, is not the ideal we should be striving for. We should be striving for total elimination of the slate system and decoupling of as many candidates as possible. In a body such as SGB, the goal shouldn’t be to represent the majority perfectly, but to gather as many student voices as possible. By moving to three votes, we will hopefully see a wider set of student voices represented on the Board.

Limiting each student to one vote would be even better. Here, we would ideally see even more voices represented by the Board, because in this system, students will win on small margins with small numbers of votes. This will increase the value of every vote for a Board seat and, hopefully, increase voter turnout. With SGB elections not typically exceeding 25 percent turnout, this would be an enormous change for the better. Though each Board member would have the support of a smaller proportion of the student body, the Board as a whole would be elected and supported by a much bigger, more diverse electorate. 

So today on the my.pitt portal, you may not have a choice for SGB president, but you do have a choice to make everlasting improvements to our student government. 

Be sure to vote today and, if you wish, write Rohith at rop33@pitt.edu.