After the 2010 Tufts Community Union Senate (TCU) presidential election, most of the criticism was directed not toward either candidate but toward the TCU Elections Commission (ECOM). Headlines in the Daily have read, "Hold ECOM officials accountable," "ECOM handled TCU election poorly," "ECOM: Wallis overspent," and, most recently, "Once again, ECOM flouts its responsibilities."
In order to effectively manage the elections of the Tufts community, ECOM must prove to the community that it deserves our trust. ECOM must show us that it can live up to its own standards, ensuring "fairness and equality" in elections. Transparency is the sign of an effective elections commission. By that standard ECOM is woefully ineffective, as the press coverage of each election seems to center on the failures of the commission rather than on the candidates themselves.
When I began drafting this article, I was defending ECOM. I believed that the apathy shown by the student body toward recent elections was due in large part to a disconnect between the TCU Senate and the Tufts community, and was not a result of failures on the part of ECOM. I still believe that a disconnect exists between the Senate and the student body but I have come to believe that ECOM has failed miserably in its duties.
In the run-up to the most recent presidential election, ECOM failed to post candidate biographies in a timely manner, consistently misstated the date of the election and neglected its duty to properly advertise the election beforehand.
ECOM's own bylaws state: "ECOM is responsible for the creation of the [candidate biographies] page, and will do so no later than ... six days before the presidential election."Until Monday afternoon, ECOM's website still displayed the election information for the uncontested April TCU Senate elections(you may not even have heard of these; many of my friends hadn't). As of late Monday night (the time that I wrote this) the website still advertised the date of the election as "Wednesday April 27, 2011" (it was actually Tuesday, April 26). In response to a Facebook message about the election I sent to the Class of 2014 (when to vote, who the candidates were, etc.), one of my classmates emailed me, asking, "Why wasn't this advertised weeks ago?"In fact, ECOM's mission statement says, "It is also our job to advertise every election in advance."
The fact is that ECOM has become lax in its communication with the student body. Elections should be advertised through third-party postering efforts, Daily advertisements, TuftsLife announcements and even Facebook events. While ECOM did manage to carry these out at a minimal level, the fact remains that it's not enough; they need to more and they need to do it better.
Despite its recent history of botched elections, ECOM can still be reformed: The Senate has the authority to rewrite the commission's bylaws, to keep a close eye on the impartiality of the body and to enforce advertising deadlines. Ultimately, however, the responsibility to ensure the fairness, transparency and equality of our elections falls to us, the students of the Tufts community. We can blame no one else if our elections are not up to par; we must speak out and take control of our school and its government. Student government is no government at all if it does not respond to the students. ECOM, the Senate, the Judiciary – their power is nothing compared to the power of the whole student body (when, and only when, it actually speaks up for itself).
That said, I am amazed that ECOM is allowed to continue conducting elections in a manner that does not befit the strongly democratic atmosphere of Tufts University. Tufts deserves an elections commission that obeys its own bylaws, that advertises its elections and that conducts elections smoothly, transparently and openly. Tufts deserves better.
This article has been updated from its original version.
