Submission: Board’s handling of USAC elections deplorable

As board members of UCLA’s Young Americans for Liberty and Bruin Republicans we represent the voices of libertarians and conservatives on this campus. We can mutually attest to the deplorable handling of this year’s student government elections thus far by both the Election Board and the Undergraduate Students Association Council and thank the Judicial Board for overturning this year’s elections calendar.

From the outset, the process has been botched. Candidate lists were officially announced on Thursday, April 10. Yet after the endorsement eligibility form was made available to us on April 12, student groups only had four days to submit the form, which was due on April 16. Beyond this, though the Election Board ultimately posted the form, it put it in such a hard-to-find location that some clubs had to email the Election Board to find out where it was in the first place. This was ineffective as some groups had to rely on word of mouth to be informed about the deadlines anyway.

After the form was released, basic information was never communicated to student organizations such as ours. It was not made clear whether a representative in multiple organizations could represent more than one club at the endorsement hearing if other representatives from the groups in question were unavailable. Additionally, club representatives received conflicting information about when they should attend endorsement orientation sessions. All that would have been necessary would have been a simple clarifying email from the Election Board answering the multiple inquiries it received from various student organizations asking both questions.

While we are sure that the Election Board’s lack of communication is more due to general incompetence than willful intent to reduce participation, the reality is that many clubs lost the ability to endorse candidates in this election because they were never made aware of the deadlines involved due to the Election Board’s mismanagement. The only violations most of these groups committed were simple technicalities that would have been easy to avoid had the Election Board taken the effort to be the responsive advocate of student concerns it purports to be.

The most glaring difference between this year’s Election Board and the last is the dramatically shortened voting period it imposed. In a precedent seven years strong, students have had the opportunity to vote four full days from Monday to Thursday. This year, students would have only had two days and eight hours – 9 a.m. Tuesday to 5 p.m. Thursday. The Election Board attempted to justify this move by arguing that the shortened period would give students more time to reflect on their choices, even referencing the possibility of an earthquake or technical glitch as a reason for shorter voting time. But more time to reflect means more time, not less.

With only 36.6 percent of the undergraduate study body voting in last year’s Undergraduate Students Association Council elections, the Election Board should have been doing everything it could to increase turnout, but instead the Judicial Board had to force it to fall on the side of common sense.

The Election Board’s apparent inability to communicate simple deadlines and procedures brings up larger election issues that should be addressed by the next council. Why does the Judicial Board have to force USAC appointees to do the right thing? And why is an endorsement hearing even necessary? Why can’t club signatories submit an online form with their student ID numbers containing their group’s endorsement choices instead of hoping that they’ll be available for an arbitrarily set meeting time? If we really care about letting more students make their voices heard, then this shouldn’t be controversial.

All students should be angry about these mishaps, regardless of politics, because we all pay mandatory fees subsidizing this kind of behavior. We consider these deficiencies a failure of both the Election Board’s management and USAC’s overall leadership this year in creating an environment where these serious lapses would even be possible. Frankly, we’re glad there’s an election this week.

Koteskey is the co-president of Young Americans for Liberty at UCLA and a third-year history and political science student. Guo is the co-president of Young Americans for Liberty at UCLA and a second-year economics student. Chakar is the president of Bruin Republicans and a third-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student. Ahari is a third-year political science student.