The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Elections Commission (ECOM) announced yesterday that a referendum featuring three amendments to the TCU constitution had passed, despite an appeal.
Two of the amendments, all of which appeared on last week's ballot, will change the process by which student groups are able to hold community representative seats in the Senate. Community representatives act as spokespeople for their groups, participating in Senate meetings and voting on most of the Senate's decisions.
The vote to determine whether a student group can receive a community representative has historically been conducted in student body-wide elections, but Wednesday's first amendment changed this. The vote will now be conducted within the Senate.
The second amendment internalizes the process by which community representatives are re-approved. Rather than needing to receive the support of the student body, each group that already has a community representative will need to receive a two-thirds vote from the Senate every year to retain its seat.
The third amendment will add a historian position to ECOM, enlarging the board to five people.
Freshman Christopher Snyder appealed the referendum last week. Snyder, who is also a copy editor for the Daily, claimed that ECOM did not follow its own by-laws, as it failed to sufficiently advertise the proposed amendments.
"When I went on to vote on Wednesday, the first time I knew about the referendum was when I saw the ballot," Snyder told the Daily. He also noted that the option to abstain from voting on the referendum was not as prominently displayed as the options for approving and disapproving the amendments.
The TCU Judiciary struck down the appeal in a 5-2 vote on Friday. It subsequently released the previously withheld results in an announcement yesterday. ECOM does not release the percentages in referendum votes.
In its decision, the Judiciary ruled that Snyder's complaints comprised "harmless error" on the part of ECOM. The student body's "overwhelming vote in favor of the ... referendum question" demonstrated that, had the complaints been addressed before Wednesday's election, the outcome of the vote would not have been affected, the decision stated.
Recognizing ECOM's error, the Judiciary decided to require the commission to prominently display an option to abstain "on all ballots for all issues" in the future. The Judiciary also ordered ECOM to allocate funds dedicated to better advertising referendum questions in its fiscal year 2009 budget. In addition, ECOM must "modify ... [its] bylaws such that there are specific mechanisms for both elections in which there are candidates and elections in which there are referendum questions."
Snyder said that he was "pleased" with the ruling, but still expressed concerns about ECOM's actions in last Wednesday's elections.
ECOM Chair Anjali Nirmalan, a junior, declined to comment on the decision.
Nirmalan said she hopes members of the Class of 2012 will step up in the fall to fill ECOM's fourth and fifth positions.
