USG proposes amendments

The USG took the first of two votes on adopting a package of 30 amendments to its constitution at the USG Senate meeting Sunday night. If the Senate passes them a second time at its next meeting, they will be adopted into the constitution.

The amendments were introduced by USG vice president Stephen Stolzenberg ’13 and U-Councilor Elan Kugelmass ’14 in order to “correct misspellings, simplify language and rectify grammatical mistakes” and to “identify and rectify procedural, organizational and semantic inconsistencies,” they said in the proposal.

Changes to the constitution included altering the procedure when calling officers up for review, establishing a formal voting procedure and providing leeway for scheduling of freshman class council elections, among many others. There were also 26 cosmetic changes to the constitution in the amendment package.

“We always wanted to do a cleanup project and so we did it,” Kugelmass said.

Due to disapproval of the proposed change to Section VI.E.9, which stripped the social chair of immunity from review, the Senate struck that amendment from the package.

“It’s going to slow the work down that we do and we aren’t going to be able to do it,” USG social chair Benedict Wagstaff ’14 said, explaining that the change would have required the social committee to have every decision it made approved by the USG. “It would have made our job near impossible.”

With the exception of that one clause, the vote to amend passed unanimously with 23 members in favor and zero opposed or abstaining. A second round of voting on the amendment package will take place at the USG Senate’s next meeting on Jan. 13 since the amendments must be passed in consecutive sessions in order to go into effect.

Elections Manager Julian Dean ’13 also addressed voter turnout, the gender breakdown of candidates and voter behavior at the request of several members. Dean is also a former operations manager for The Daily Princetonian.

Using data from elections dating back to spring 2011, Dean showed that the winter elections for senators, committee chair positions and USG president and vice president received the highest voter turnout while the spring elections for U-Councilors and class governments and the fall elections for the freshman class government received a lower turnout.

Dean’s data also showed that the gender split in interest in class government varies by position, but one position stood out.

“Why don’t men want to be class secretary?” Dean asked the USG in response to numbers that show only women have run for the position in seven out of the past nine elections. “I think this is a relevant thing if you’re interested in how genders are represented in class governments.”

He then showed data that showed there was a direct correlation between the number of candidates running in a given election and the number of candidates each voter approved. Students will vote for more candidates in total if there are more candidates to choose from, Dean explained.

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“Isn’t that amazing? You couldn’t make this up,” he said in response to USG members who expressed disbelief.

The USG also heard a presentation from Director of Career Services Beverly Hamilton-Chandler, reviewed the remaining budget, discussed next semester’s Mental Health Awareness Week — which USG president Bruce Easop ’13 and U-Councilors Elektra Alivisatos ’14 and Farrah Bui ’14 hope to hold during the last week of February — and heard plans for the project to install holiday lights along the walkway adjacent to McCosh Hall next winter.