The Peak

The death of independant elections at SFU

By John Morrison III

In any healthy democracy, there is always tension between the politicians and those who run the elections. Elections are, after all, the one thing that politicians cannot directly control. That is, until now.

The Independent Electoral Commission is a body of the Simon Fraser Student Society intended to oversee the election of the SFSS board of directors. In theory, the IEC is an unbiased group of students who ensure fair election practices are followed independent of political influence.

This was certainly the case for the last few years. Though the SFSS’s election policies were far from perfect, recent elections had been characterized by a high degree of trust between the IEC and the board, which allowed the IEC to administer elections with almost no influence by the student politicians. Turnout in elections was relatively high, record numbers of candidates ran for office, and the legitimacy of the results were not contested.

But over the course of the last year, the Independent Electoral Commission has lost its ability to oversee elections in anything close to an independent fashion. The past year has seen the deterioration of the IEC’s strongly independent spirit, and instead has devolved into a heavily manipulated, underpaid gang of students. It is now largely made up of inexperienced yet well-intentioned newbies who are ripe for exploitation by the very people they are meant to watch over.

I served on the commission under now-outgoing chief, Panther Kuol, and it was during this time that I saw the current SFSS board of directors steadily corrode the IEC’s ability to self-determinate.

Over the summer, SFSS Internal Relations Officer Andrew Fergusson took it upon himself to meddle with the IEC’s workings. He single-handedly rewrote the elections policy, making sweeping changes while ignoring recommendations made by past and present IECs. By the end, so many revisions were made that he actually referred to the new election rules as his “baby.” Is this the sort of thing a politician should be bragging about — especially one like Fergusson, who is almost certainly going to be running for re-election under the very rules he just authored?

Among the worst reforms was the destruction of the IEC’s ability to hold institutional memory. The five-member body’s previous one-year terms have been abandoned, with the entire group now being discarded at the conclusion of each election. So the IEC will always be changing, before and after elections, and the board can now appoint whichever IEC suits their own short-term interests.

Of course, in order to ensure compliance with these new rules, the board sought to push out the incumbent gang of reformists IEC members (myself included) and install a crew of wet-behind-the-ears amateurs. With absolutely no previous IEC experience, these new election commissioners would naturally look to the board for all direction.

This was all accomplished in two ways: firstly, the board of directors continually cut IEC members’ pay and, secondly, they systematically kept the most involved students from sitting on the commission. Today, the compensation of the four deputy IEC commissioners has been slashed to the equivalent of about $4 per hour. This served as a deterrent to experienced commissioners who had done the same job previously for double the wage.

Several directors of the SFSS board even tried openly discouraging incumbent commissioners from re-applying in order to establish a completely new IEC. But if that didn’t work, they helped push them out by passing a new rule stating that anyone who had served on Forum (a collection of departmental student union representatives that serves as an advisory body to the board) or ran in a previous election were automatically disqualified. Considering that the IEC has traditionally been composed of former candidates for SFSS office, this rule-change did little more than keep out the most interested and knowledgeable student society keeners.

The new policy spells out in ridiculously specific detail what to do in every conceivable election-related situation, from how big posters may be, to how long candidate statements can be, to what sorts of punishments must be given for various clearly spelled-out “offenses.” Previously, this was the sort of thing the independent electoral commission itself decided, but now any shred of independent oversight that the IEC could once have claimed to have has been replaced by a strict system of politician-made rules. These rules are themselves penned by a director who will almost certainly run in an election governed by them and administered by an inexperienced and easily influenced IEC chosen by him.

The IEC is not independent. What was once the closest thing that the student society had to a sovereign judicial branch has become a puppet to the executive, assuring the career student politicians’ stranglehold on the control of a multi-million-dollar organization that every SFU student involuntarily pays into and cannot opt out of.