Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/11/04/voting_ends_constitution_fight_begins.php
Friday, November 4, 2005
On October 23, Allen Collins '53 soundly defeated petition candidate D. Dean Spatz '66 by a count of 248 to 140 to become President of the Association of Alumni. The remaining positions on the Association's Executive Committee were filled by internally-nominated candidates, who emerged victorious by similar margins. Merle Adelman '80 will serve as First Vice President, Precious Stargell '85 as Second Vice President, and Stanley Colla '66 as Secretary-Treasurer. Other incoming members of the Executive Committee are Kate Aiken '92, Albrt Cook '62, Ann Fromholz '90, William Hutchinson '76, Frederick Roesch '60, Kaja Schuppert '95, Steven White '77. (Complete results can be accessed at http://alumni.dartmouth.edu/leadership/association/vote-results.html).
These officers will represent all of Dartmouth's 60,000+ living alumni despite being elected by the approximately 400 graduates that were present in Alumni Hall for the vote. Many of these were members of the non-elected Alumni Council, who were flown in for Homecoming Weekend and are known for their loyalty to the administration.
While this election marked an anticlimactic and decidedly unrepresentative end to a hotly-contested election, the battle over proposed changes to the constitution has just begun. In the hour following the vote, changes proposed by the Alumni Governance Task Force were introduced and discussed for the first time. Newly-elected Alumni Association President Collins "found it to be a very cordial, much more upbeat debate than I expected," according to the Daily Dartmouth. While this may have been so, supporters of recent petition campaigns—in their unsuccessful Alumni Association and successful Board of Trustees incarnations—have begun protesting loudly over numerous provisions in the proposed constitution.
As we have previously reported [see TDR 10/7/05], the constitution would strip the (ostensibly) representative Alumni Association of nearly all its power, while deceptively repackaging a nearly unchanged Alumni Council as an "Alumni Assembly."
Additionally, the changes suggested by the AGTF would make it more difficult for petition candidates, who have been victorious in the last three trustee elections, to get on the ballot by requiring they file before rather than after official candidates are announced.
Supporters of the proposed constitution have attempted to sidestep the latter criticism by claiming that the selection of official candidates is not such as much a closed process after all. In an October 31 guest column in the Daily Dartmouth—pedantically titled "How Alumni Balloting Works"—Julie Amstein Cillo '92, Chair of the Alumni Council Trustee Nominating and Search Committee, took issue "with College Trustee T.J. Rodgers '70's current characterization of the trustee ballot as being comprised of 'establishment candidates.'"
Cillo's Op-Ed is virtually an object lesson in the art of the non sequitur, as the second half of many of her sentences belie the assertions made by the first half. For instance, she writes:
With many different backgrounds being represented on the Nominating Committee, each person brings a unique perspective that, when combined with discussions and contemplation about a proposed trustee ballot, strives to ensure that Dartmouth remains an institution that is revered by alumni, faculty, prospective students and the community at large.
"Ensure that Dartmouth remains an institution that is revered" is seemingly coded language for "ensure that the status quo is upheld," implying that the perspectives of the Nominating Committee, unique though they may be, are included with a consensus that is not shared by the three recent victorious petition candidates. Moreover, how unique can these perspectives be, given that the members of the Nominating Committee are drawn from the Alumni Council? Not to worry, says, Cillo: Members of the Council "have been selected by fellow alumni because of their service to the College and their ability to represent a wide range of alumni and student opinion and sentiment." Another non sequitur, as those that serve the College in the official capacity Cillo has in mind represent a narrow band of student and alumni opinion—one, not incidentally, that does not include the views of the aforementioned petition Trustees.
Cillo persists. Names for the trustee ballot, she asserts, "can be submitted by any alumna/e and any alumni group at any time during the year." Later on, however, she notes that "a proposed ballot is submitted to the Alumni Council for approval before announcement to the overall alumni body is made." (Translation for the Pravda edition: Any Russian can be nominated for the Politburo, you see, so long as the Party Congress approves). And so it goes.
Another controversial provision of the proposed constitution would be to elect Trustee candidates via Partial Preference Voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting) rather than the currently-employed Approval Voting. While Approval Voting allows alumni to choose as many candidates as they want, giving victory to the candidate(s) with the greatest approval, the latter would require alumni to rank their preferences, with the votes of the candidate with the lowest total in each round going to his supporters' subsequent preference, and so on.
While most statisticians agree that Approval Voting better reflects' voters actual preferences than Partial Preference Voting as a general rule, controversy has raged on campus as to which method would be preferable for future trustee elections. A general consensus has developed that PPV disadvantages outsider candidates (e.g. petitioners), but the question remains as to whether this is a good or a bad thing.
Take the example of three official candidates and one petition candidate. The latter could be victorious with a narrow plurality under approval voting but, presuming a bimodal distribution of voter preferences (as seemingly occurs among Dartmouth alumni), the petition candidate would be easily defeated by instant runoffs, i.e. the most popular official candidate would accrue the votes of his two less popular colleagues.
In an October 31 editorial in support of PPV in The Dartmouth, Paul Heintz '06 set up the debate between the merits of a victorious candidate winning by a plurality versus a majority (albeit a majority made by supporters of the least popular candidates, the obvious drawback of such a system). The real life application of this controversy is last year's election for Student Assembly President, in which Heintz himself received a plurality of first round votes but lost to current SA President Noah Riner '06, who was preferred by first-round supporters of the three other candidates who were eliminated before the final round.
Heintz, however, implies a false parallel, because Trustee elections are decided by approval rather than plurality voting. That is, while four official candidates were defeated by two petition candidates—Todd Zywicki '88 and Peter Robinson '79—there was nothing stopping alumni from selecting all four official candidates, rendering PPV unnecessary. (It should be noted that Heintz egregiously misstated this fact in his Op-Ed, in which he claimed that voters were could only select a number candidates equal to the number of open positions, i.e. 2).
This debate only hints, however, at an issue more central than the relative merits of approval and instant runoff voting. The same people who are complaining that a majority of votes were "split" among four candidates are those who earlier passed a regulation that there must be more official candidates than open spots in each trustee election—a regulation passed to thwart petition candidates after John Steel '54 was victorious in a one-on-one 1980 contest. Petitioners, unbound by any such arbitrary constraints, have no reason to field more candidates than vacant board positions.
The larger issue, then, is that, regardless of the merits of any given provision, the new constitution is an exercise in capriciousness designed to achieve certain ends rather than codify any consistent means. The very process by which the constitution is to be considered is illustrative of this. The document is scheduled for discussion in February, at which time an amendment will be proposed to modify the rules by which the constitution may be amended. Currently, an amendment requires approval by 3/4 of alumni present at a meeting. Under the amendment proposed in February, future amendment (e.g. the new constitution) could be enacted by 2/3 of alumni who participate in an all-media voting election.
The latter provision marks a bold move towards democracy—the single issue around which petitioners have rallied. However, all media voting under the February would apply only to amendments and not to other voting—such as elections for the executive committee of the Association of Alumni. This inconsistency suggests an ulterior motive on the part of the amendment's proponents and provoked lengthy comment from Lone Pine revolutionary Joe Asch '79 in a November 2 the Daily Dartmouth op-ed:
If the alumni fail to ratify the proposed constitution, the current leadership is afraid of what might happen if all alumni could vote at the next general election.Quite obviously, this insider group supports democracy only when it knows the outcome of voting in advance, either because it can fill a room in Hanover with loyalists, or because it ensures that only its own candidates will be able to run for office.
To be blunt, this new constitution is a mess. It is just democratic enough to pass the straight-face test, but not democratic enough to allow a real expression of alumni concerns. Its only selling point is that some nice folks have worked long and hard on it.
In fact, this lengthy constitution resembles Europe's recently rejected constitution much more than the inspired document that guides the United States of America.
The proposed constitution should be thrown out now, before it is summarily rejected by alumni voters in open voting. Then, a free election for the leadership of the Association should be held among all alums, not just those carefully assembled in Hanover. That day will mark the start of democracy at Dartmouth.
While it is unlikely that the task force's constitution will be thrown out without a vote, it's almost certainty that debate on the document will continue to rage until February—and beyond.