ASB senator Paul Neubert discusses a bill during a meeting in Oxford, Miss., Tuesday, April 8, 2014. (Photo/Thomas Graning)
Former ASB Vice-president Morgan Gregory jokingly passes the gavel to current Vice-president Emerson George during a meeting in Oxford, Miss., Tuesday, April 8, 2014. (DM Photo/Aditya Khare )
The Associated Student Body senators voted Tuesday to table the Approval Voting Act of 2014.
The Approval Voting Act of 2014 was written to change the current ASB voting system.
The university currently uses a plurality voting system for personality elections and a run-off system for government elections. If the bill is passed, the voting system will change to an approval voting system. This would allow students to vote for as many candidates on the ballot as they so choose as well as write in one candidate.
Sen. Paul Neubert, member of the committee on governmental operations, presented the bill. Neubert said he thought writing the bill would help the student body by promoting democracy.
“It helps voters to express themselves better, more fully,” Neubert said. “That’s the point of democracy. That’s the point of upholding elections so voters can express themselves.”
Some senators spoke in support of the bill. Sen. John West said that while he voted to table the bill, he thought the bill offered a way to improve the election process on campus.
“I support the bill because I feel like it’s time to try something new,” West said. “I want for the senate to do more research on this, that’s why I support tabling this because I think it has the potential to make the voting process at Ole Miss more democratic. I think that, ultimately, that is what we should be striving to do. I don’t think the best system is the best system necessarily just because it’s the one we’ve been using for a long time or because it’s the one predominately used in America.”
Sen. Sam Hearn said he spoke against the bill because he finds the current voting system to work affectively.
“The main thing for me in the election bill was that it gave one person more than one opportunity to elect a position such as president or vice president or one of the singular positions,” Hearn said. “I think that one person should get to vote for one thing, and I don’t see why we need to change the way that works. I think it would lead to more confusion in our electoral system and also make us a more inefficient electoral body as a student body.”
Neubert said other universities across the nation currently use the approval voting system. He said San Francisco State University, Dartmouth College and the University of Colorado Boulder are included in these universities.
“In terms of universities, San Francisco State University has been using it for more than a decade in all their student government elections,” Neubert said. “The University of Colorado Boulder, they’ve been using it for two or three years, I think 2011 or 2012, and they use that in all their student government elections. They’re really cool because they have the largest student government budget of any university or college in the nation. They’re a pretty big school, and they’re doing this because they know what they’re doing. And then Dartmouth College also uses it.”
Fifty-three senators voted in affirmation of the bill. None voted in negation, and one senator voted in abstention. The bill will be brought back to the senate floor for a vote in two weeks.
