New election bylaw levels playing field

On Sunday night the Vassar Student Association (VSA) passed an amendment to the bylaws regarding elections. After reading that sentence, I assume most of you will just give up and go read the Humor & Satire section instead. Could this get more boring? Most of us don't really know what a "bylaw" even is, or how it differs from the Constitution or why we should care. A post on SayAnything about guys with beards is more riveting than this stuff.

And yet what happened on Sunday night was incredibly important and—amidst all the voting on voting on voting—terribly exciting. Last year, elections were changed to a system where filling and campaigning overlapped, which meant that those who filed first got more time to campaign than those who filed later, and therefore had an unfair advantage. The amendment which was passed on Sunday got rid of that overlap. [See "Council passes election bylaws amendment"] While that might seem like a simple, small, boring change, it fundamentally alters the way elections at this school happen. The issue was deeply contentious, and members of the VSA debated, and sometimes yelled, and sometimes cried, because making this system as fair as possible mattered. It mattered to the students on Council (and to some students not on Council—myself included), and it should matter to you.

Regardless of what you think of the VSA or how it does its job, thanks to Shared Governance the students on Council have a surprising amount of power at this school. Who gets elected, and what they do when they get there, influences more about your day-to-day life here at Vassar than you probably realize. So even if you care very little about anything else the VSA does or how they do it, you should probably care about elections. You should care that elections are as fair and open as they can possibly be, so that voices from every corner of this college can be heard. You should care that you and everyone you know has an equal opportunity to effect change at this institution, and you should care that your current representatives had the guts to do just that on Sunday night.

There is not a lot of institutional memory among students at Vassar, but election by-laws have changed every year since I got here in 2008, and at least twice before that. We don't revise our bylaws on a yearly basis because it's fun, or because each new Council thinks last year's Council were idiots. We revise our election by-laws every year because they matter—the process isn't perfect yet, and we want it to be perfect. No one, I believe, has ever purposefully proposed an amendment to the bylaws that would make the election process worse. Last year, as happens every year, the bylaws were changed, and they were changed with the best of intentions; but in retrospect, the changes led to a system that was unfair at a most basic level.

The new, revised bylaws bring us back to a system that is fundamentally fair. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should probably point out that the system we have returned to is one that I personally helped construct two years ago when I was on Council and a Board of Elections co-chair. I can say with full honesty, however, that I don't really care about that. I am far more proud to have been a part of the process this year, to have been one of those debating and yelling (and maybe crying just a little bit). And we're not done yet. I believe the bylaws are a living, breathing document that must continue to change. There are still improvements to be made, but I am a senior, so this is the last time I can be a part of this process. I urge the Council not to let this issue fall through the cracks in the future. VSA Council has the power to get us to a system that works well 100 percent of the time. Now they can be proud that they are working from a foundation of fairness. You, the students of Vassar College, have the power to agitate for whatever further election reform you think is necessary. And trust me: It will be exciting.

—Hannah Groch-Begley '12 was Noyes House president and chair of the Board of Elections during 2009-10.