Anyone closely following the UF Student Government elections last year knows things did not go as planned. In fact, it would not be inappropriate to say that the elections were botched.
Furthermore, when members of the Student Senate tried to create some sense of accountability by bringing articles of impeachment against the supervisor of elections, the Senate screwed this up as well.
Although the Senate agreed that many of its election codes were violated by the supervisor during the election process, they did not find that this dereliction of duty merited a removal from office — just a wag of the finger.
Well, it's a new year and the Senate has revised its election code in order to prevent the horrendous disaster that was last semester's election.
But do these revisions do enough to curtail mistakes or the chances of corruption?
Well, sort of.
Last semester, Supervisor of Elections Toni Megna did not return the Alligator's requests for a comment on whether or not she followed the SG election code 715.0 by testing the system two days prior to the election. In the revisions, the Senate simply decided to change the rule to one week rather than two days. Megna argued they would have to pay people extra money to get them to come in on a weekend to test the system.
While we commend their commitment to fiscal restraint in this situation, why could they not test the system on the Monday before or, if that's problematic, the Friday before? A lot can happen in a week.
Next, they added a new rule that states, "In the event that a polling location becomes unavailable due to an event or circumstance outside the control of the election staff, the Supervisor of Elections, at his or her discretion, may add or change a polling location to the nearest available building" as long as there are notifications at the original polling location.
While there may be reasons to add a rule like this to the election code (for instance, a power outage in a building), the vagueness of the language lends this rule to be possibly abused by future supervisors.
Imagine you are headed to your assigned poll location and when you arrive, you are told that the polling location has changed to a building accross the street. Perhaps you don't have time or do not feel like walking to that building because your original polling location was on your way to class. A ruling like this, if abused, could have a huge effect on voter turnout.
Given the propensity of past supervisors to not adhere to the rules, it might have been a good idea to add some checks to the ability of supervisors to change polling locations.
To be fair, many of the rule changes make sense. However, the rules mentioned above should be looked at with greater scrutiny by Student Government.
