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The GW Hatchet

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Officials name senior vice president, chief of staff
By Fiona Riley, Assistant News Editor • March 26, 2024

Editorial: Mocking the process

This year’s Student Association elections have proceeded smoothly, with few candidates promulgating issues against other candidates. This, however, is juxtaposed with the complaints, bias and ineptitude of the election’s oversight body, the Joint Elections Committee. The JEC has lost sight of its mission and deviated from the interest of regular GW students hoping for a fair election. By allowing personal politics to dictate their actions, the JEC has corrupted this year’s SA elections.

The JEC is supposed to ensure student elections are run fairly without causing harm to the University or its students. Instead, the JEC wastes time determining whether a candidate has more than 20 percent of his or her posters along the H street side of the Marvin Center or decrying a candidate for putting up a Web site or a Facebook group prior to the official start of campaigning. Elections could be better administered by a JEC focused on big-picture issues. Last year’s JEC overlooked charges of bribery in favor of deliberating on this same type of minutiae. As long as the JEC is focused on poster limits, Facebook groups and furthering childish SA politics, its actual duty – organizing and promoting fair elections – will be lost in the masses of paperwork that it produces each election season.

While it is obvious that election rules have their place and need to be upheld, rules that contradict basic principles of democracy and free speech are unwarranted and unnecessary in student government elections. Students should be protected from screaming masses of candidates yelling outside of the Marvin Center, flyers littering their dorms and annoying knocks on their doors. However, students do not need to be protected from a candidate’s premature posting of their Web site or the creation of a Facebook group. Oversight on these issues is treading on infringement of basic principles of free speech.

Another problem plaguing the JEC is the very composition of its membership. The Senate forced JEC Chairman Justin Neidig to resign from his position as SA Senate chief-of-staff earlier this year due to his contentious relationship with the Senate. Now, as JEC chairman, he cannot reasonably be expected to check his bias at the door. The Committee acts as judge, jury and executioner in hearings against the very senators Neidig once sparred with earlier in the year. So long as SA insiders are permitted to serve on the JEC, it is possible for them to use it as a platform to perpetuate internal SA political vendettas.

It has been evident during this campaign season that members of the public and the JEC have been filing frequent complaints against certain candidates – while overlooking similar or duplicate violations from other candidates. This page recognizes that rule violations did occur. However, it seems that if every candidate had been charged with every violation they deserved, students would have faced an empty ballot during this election. Broader campaigning rules that actually work to ensure a fair election season could alleviate this problem.

It is easy to forget during the student government election season that the majority of students on GW’s campus are uninterested in the minutiae of the Joint Elections Committee and the campaign ‘scandals’ that ensue. A normal student, unaffiliated with the Student Association, does not necessarily care how many violations each candidate has, cannot name most of the senate candidates and will probably only vote if they are friends with one. If the JEC continues to see itself as the body in charge of handing penalties, it will only serve to further ostracize students from the Student Association. Only when the JEC understands that its mandate is to provide a forum for student voice in a fair and safe manner will GW students find any relevancy in its student government.

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