On April 2, 561 students cast their ballots to elect the 2010-11 Community Senate executives. The vote was won by the WE ticket, headed by President-elect Dana Hamdan and consisting of Vice President-elect Patchouli Oerther, Secretary-elect Anne St. Claire, and Treasurer-elect Andre Arguimbau. The group defeated one other ticket, whose candidates included Hannah Kennedy, Lamar Gibson, Starlet Tetteh, and Sam Huff. The numbers continue a two-year trend of record voting turnout, with 316 votes for the winning ticket and 225 to the losing. The margin of victory was 36 percent smaller than in the 2009-10 election.
“It was close,” said current President Nancy Klosteridis. “It was 81 votes. Both tickets had support because they both had a good position. But in the end, the preference leaned towards Dana’s ticket. I think it was the stronger ticket.”
Losing vice-presidential candidate Lamar Gibson was optimistic about student participation despite his ticket’s loss.
“The turnout, while not where I would’ve liked it, represents an understanding of the student body that Senate does play a role in their lives at Guilford,” Gibson said in an e-mail interview.
Hannah Kennedy, presidential candidate of the defeated ticket, also pointed to the increased participation as a result of the election’s outcome.
“This is the third election that I’ve been present in and the fact that we had not only ground-breaking numbers, but the kinds of people that voted in this election – for both parties – was incredibly inspiring,” Kennedy said. “The amount of athletes and various other factions on campus that usually feels sort of disenfranchised coming out and using their voice was incredibly empowering.”
The WE ticket’s winning campaign included a platform focused on increasing student participation.
“Senate needs to be proactive in getting student involvement,” Oerther said. “This means prioritizing filling every student seat on the various faculty/administration committees around campus, which previously have not been filled, or have only been offered to students with high positions in senate.”
Hamdan cited the diversity of senate representation as a primary concern for next year’s executive council.
“(We) stress the importance of student representation across our community,” said Hamdan in an e-mail interview. “We are creating a student athlete representative position on steering (committee) and a multicultural position.”
While the executive council is looking to increase the quality of student representation by filling senate’s empty seats and creating new ones, they first face the task of replacing one of their own.
On April 5, less than 48 hours after winning the executive seats, Arguimbau, a first-year, handed in a letter of resignation, leaving the newly elected executive council without a treasurer. Arguimbau was unable officially to comment on his resignation.
In response to Arguimbau’s resignation, the executive council-elect asked for time during the April 7 senate meeting to discuss a replacement.
Klosteridis began the discussion by outlining the procedure for replacing a member of the executive council as defined in the bylaws, which state, “The Executive Council shall nominate a candidate for the office of the Secretary or Treasurer, who will assume office immediately, pending approval of the Senate.”
On behalf of the executives, Hamdan motioned to nominate Gibson, originally the vice-presidential candidate on Kennedy’s ticket, as a replacement for the treasurer position.
Soon after, a second motion was introduced by junior Trevor Corning, former vice president of the current executive council, who resigned following the March 31 meeting in which the WE ticket was reinstated. Corning’s motion called for the replacement of the now-incomplete council-elect by the members of the opposing ticket.
“I believe that the community has been fraudulently led and has been completely misinformed and misguided by (the WE ticket) in this process,” Corning said when asked by senate members to explain the reasoning behind the motion. “I believe that the community’s voice has been disregarded in an act of authoritarian power.”
Corning’s motion was met with resistance from several senators, and after several rounds of discussion never made it to vote.
“(The motion) was just totally against procedure,” said Klosteridis in a post-meeting interview. “There would need to be an impeachment. It was just so left-field. It was just in response to what some people thought was a mockery of the bylaws last week.
“There’s this feeling that because the bylaws were interpreted and stretched last time, and for some people broken, this time there was no law, there were no bylaws, and that anything could happen.”
Following the dismissal of Corning’s motion, Hamdan’s motion to approve Gibson’s nomination was put before the senate. After several senators expressed concern over a lack of community involvement in the decision-making process, senate agreed to postpone the decision until a later date.
“We weren’t allowed to decide tonight because more motions kept coming through,” said Klosteridis. “We felt like we didn’t have enough people here to make a decision, and that’s a totally legitimate argument, so in the end we didn’t make any decision.”
On Monday, April 12, Community Senate will meet in Founders Gallery to reexamine Gibson’s nomination.