[1247] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Election reform ideas and call for more
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jennifer C Berk)
Fri Mar 15 20:20:43 2002
Message-ID: <200203160119.UAA02849@magic-pi-ball.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 20:19:20 -0500
From: Jennifer C Berk <jcberk@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
Every year the UA has election scandals.
Every year the UA rewrites some of its election procedures.
Maybe elections are getting incrementally better - I think in some
respects they are (Election Commission is now unlikely to be appointed
by the former running mate of a current candidate) - but they haven't
gotten good yet.
My suspicion is that one of the reasons we don't have a good system
yet is that not enough eyeballs are catching its loopholes and
assorted idiocies. Election codes tend to get written by people with
some degree of tunnel vision. Lots of people have said this year in
this forum that the UA needs a new system; even today's Tech called
for "legislative reform". In the interests of getting a good system
out of that reform, maybe people who've commented on this election
could offer some ideas and some perspective, whether they're active UA
members or not.
I've dumped some of my thoughts about how elections could work in
/mit/jcberk/Public/Election/ (http://web.mit.edu/jcberk/Public/Election/
for the Athena-squicked) - take a look and write your own.
Here's hoping some useful ideas might come out of *this* year's
election scandal.
Jennifer
Former UA-type (CHO, Council, NomComm, presidential candidate, etc.)
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