More Questions 3

This one from H. Flint Ranney '56, with a response (as in the previous post) from Bill Hutchinson '76.

Why are alumni trustee petition candidates required to be presented 30 days before the Nominating Committee meets instead of at the same meeting? Doesn't this put petition candidates at a disadvantage, or is that the exact purpose of this provision?

Hi, Flint (he's a fellow islander)! While you may have seen this topic addressed before (see #5 in the previous post), it bears repeating.

The current AGTF draft calls for petition forms to be available 30 days before the date of the meeting when the Nominating Committee will announce its slate. Petitioners have those 30 days to gather a reduced number of signatures (250) and present them to the NomComm before that body meets. Thus, the NomComm slate and the qualifying petition candidates will be announced at roughly the same time (I say roughly, because I suppose it might be possible, in rare circumstances, for a petitioner to run in with a fist-full of signed petitions minutes before the NomComm meeting, and that it might take some time to verify the signatures, forcing the announcement of that petitioner's candidacy to trail that of the others somewhat).

The advantages for the petitioners are that they have the ability to campaign well before other candidates and they have to gather a smaller number of signatures. The advantage for the NomComm is that its members will know in advance of their meeting how many petition candidates will qualify for the ballot. They can then adjust the number of candidates they put forward, mostly with the objective of creating two person, head-to-head races. Such races are preferable in that they give alumni a clear choice, give the winner a clear majority, and make choosing a voting system moot (they all have their problems when there are more than two candidates). In addition, such a system would dramatically reduce the serious problem of losing the service of too many highly qualified, but unsuccessful NomComm candidates (the "churn and burn").

The one major disadvantage that some have identified with this plan, at least in principle, is that petition candidates will not have the ability to react to the slate put up by the Nominating Committee before deciding to run. What the AGTF saw was that petition candidates did not generally run against certain individuals, per se, and that they invariably started their effort to gain support well in advance of the announcement of the NomComm slate. Further, we felt that what might be lost in principle was more than compensated for by the gains obtained through creating head-to-head races, clear majority wins for the victors, reducing "churn and burn", and simplified voting procedures for alumni.