Last week, 32 percent of undergraduates voted in the Duke Student Government elections for committee senators and vice presidents. While campaigns and DSG emails in the lead-up to the election focused on the list of candidates present on the ballot, they failed to emphasize the referenda students would also be asked to weigh in on, one of which called for a re-evaluation of the funding mechanism for the Chanticleer, the student yearbook. Although the referendum was purely informational, its lack of clarity and previous publicity highlighted clear problems with the DSG information propagation and voting system.
The Chanticleer referendum presented students with two options. The first would allow students to allocate a portion of their activities fee each year towards a subsidized yearbook gifted upon graduation. The second would maintain the status quo in which students can choose to purchase a yearbook, at full cost, at the end of each academic year. The unclear wording of the referendum, however, may have obscured the details of the options from students. The referendum misleadingly began by stating that “Every senior would automatically get a free yearbook.” Considering that the yearbook would be funded through each student’s activity fee over the course of four years, that claim was simply not true.
The opportunity cost for funding the Chanticleer through student activities fees is actually quite tremendous. The money that would be funneled to the yearbook has, in the past, totalled up to nearly one in seven dollars of all funding overseen by the Student Organization Funding Committee. That same SOFC funding is traditionally used to throw large, open events like Springternational and ArtCon. Although the DSG referendum statute specifically states that they will disseminate information before a vote, they failed to alert students that funding “free” yearbooks would actively lessen the amount of funding available for such events. Even more egregiously, DSG failed to ensure that any information about the referendum was available to the public aside from a single guest column in the Chronicle written by the clearly biased Editor-in-Chief of the Chanticleer. DSG’s lack of action in propagating adequate amounts of information has highlighted a criticism that we have levied at them in the past: that they rarely live up to their own standards and do not substantively communicate with the students they represent.
The continuous criticism for DSG for perpetuating an uninformed voter population highlights large-scale issues with the priorities of the organization. DSG needs to do a better job of providing students with the necessary information to cast reasoned votes, and the burden of voter education should not entirely be placed on candidates. The creation of a central informational hub online could help aggregate candidate platforms and ongoing legislative proposal and projects. Further, releasing a sample ballot prior to the election would incentivize students to visit an informational website while allowing time for the issues to marinate. The Young Trustee or DSG presidential elections seem to garner more attention toward the circulation of candidate platforms and information. However, all student government elections should be given the same care. We need to give equal weight to all elections, not just to Young Trustee or DSG President. We urge DSG to make an effort to inform the students who they represent.
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