Voting Controversy in Final USS Election

The energy began on a high note at the final University Student Senate (USS) meeting of the semester on Saturday afternoon in the University Centre. Nico Galván, a BAFA student at Lang and Jazz and co-chair of the USS, danced around the room as he jammed out to rapper Kendrick Lamar, waiting for fellow senators to arrive. With four minutes to go until the 1:00pm meeting time, only two of the 16 senators had arrived.

The meeting finally began fifteen minutes late. Galván was not upbeat about it, telling  the eight senators on hand that it was unacceptable to arrive late.

Voting for next semester’s USS team–in which 54 candidates were competing for 16 seats–had closed two hours earlier, at 11am. At the Senate meeting,  Mili Ferrer, an NSPE representative, announced the voting turnout rate. “We did a lot better than last year,” she said. .

In last year’s senate elections, only 592 of the The New School’s 10,000 students cast a vote. This year’s total was 997 ballots, meaning that approximately 1 out of 10 students casted a vote.

“There’s still room for improvement, but we’ve done a much better job of spreading the word,” said Galván.

The optimistic mood lasted until Ferrer brought up the issue BAFA students had encountered during the voting process.

Under the USS constitution, all students are allowed to cast one vote for a student senator in their respective division. But what happens when a BAFA student, say one enrolled at both Parsons and Eugene Lang, has to decide which division to cast their vote under?

This question quickly turned into a heated debate.

The online ballots conducted never indicated that BAFA students were only eligible to vote for one candidate. Therefore, many BAFA students voted for two senators, one from each division.

This left the USS in a tricky position in terms of how to properly count BAFA students’ votes. Considering every student is entitled to one vote, the USS would either have to discount all votes or choose one out of the two ballots submitted the same BAFA student.

Storm Huruwitz, a Lang senator and co-chair, was the first person to propose  the idea of having BAFA students re-vote. “It’s our fault that they didn’t know and we have to take accountability for it,” said Huruwitz.

Even if a corrective email were to be sent out to BAFA students who had voted in the first election, they said, a student who is a part of two different schools should have the opportunity to vote for a senator running for each division.

The Senate agreed not to pursue an ad hoc amendment to the constitution.“In the future this issue will be addressed,” Hurwitz said, “ but to change things in the constitution now wouldn’t be right since the elections have occurred.”

In the end, seven of the eight senators present at the meeting voted that all BAFA votes would be disqualified. A new email will be sent out to those BAFA students who voted, and that they would have three to four days to re-cast their votes.