Congratulations to the newest elected member of Student Senate, Arthur Levine '13! Arthur squeaked out a 50.72% majority against Jon Rice '13 and Hallory Sindelar '13. There were 69 votes cast from 250 first-year students, for a turnout of 27.6%.
As you can see, Claremont McKenna's recent freshman class president race had 7 candidates (plus 10 write-in ballots) for a total of 181 votes cast (all data from the CMC Forum):
[table id=17 /]
Assuming that CMC's freshman class is 315, CMC's turnout was 57.5%.
This means that CMC had more than twice as many candidates and more than twice the rate of voter turnout in their own first-year rep race.
I think this begs the question:
"What exactly is going on here?!"
Related posts:
- 1st–Year Rep Election Is Unconstitutional I realized that there was something very wrong going on with the first-year representative elections when I clicked on the online ballot out of curiosity. Instead…
- First-Year Rep Admits Wrongdoing, Resigns This morning First-Year Representative Arthur Levine ’13 sent the following email to student-talk, announcing his resignation from his position. You may remember September’s botched election and…
- SoCal and bigger questions: Looking at 1st– Year Seminars First-year seminars have been on my mind since my own first-year seminar in Fall 2006. Even then, it was apparent that the quality of your class…
- Former First-year Rep Addresses Summit From Michael Hernandez-Henderson at 10:29 am on September 22 [my emphasis supplied]: Dear pitzer Community, I was also a part of the Budgetary Committee last year…
I congratulated Arthur on his win, and I think he’s gonna be a great class rep. He has some really fresh ideas.
But yet, I too was very disappointed in the turnout of the election. In my speech, I stated that in the end that what I cared most about during the election was people actually taking the time to vote.…it’s sad that a school like Pitzer, which constantly claims social action as a large part of its educational platform, had such a small turnout for the election.
If we are to be involved members of our community, and forward the values that we claim to represent as Pitzer students, we have to share our voices through democracy.
As for my take on the low turnout, I think that the online election played a large part. I know numerous freshmen who almost never check their emails, and if email is the only way to know that the election is happening, that’s a problem.