Editorial: Restructure DSG

In what has become a tired refrain for this year's Duke Student Government, Wednesday's general body meeting ended with petty personal politics preventing DSG from accomplishing much of anything of substance.

The Legislature did approve a plan for a new election system that requires a winning presidential candidate to receive a majority of the votes or face a runoff. If it survives a presidential veto, this system would ensure that every presidential race will either go to a runoff election with relatively low voter turn-out or to an automatic runoff that students could manipulate with strategic voting.

The fact that this proposal only applies to the president, and not the other executive officers, smacks of petty personal politics and a personal attack against the DSG president, Joshua Jean-Baptiste. If a majority is the fair way to elect a president, it is the fair way to elect all executive board members. A consistent policy should be applied to all executive board positions, and the presidency should not be singled out by other DSG members who are apparently acting based on personal vendettas.

Ultimately, however, even with potential turn-out concerns, a runoff is a more fair way to run elections than the current system, under which a candidate can win with a relatively small plurality. Requiring a candidate to meet such a high standard will not only ensure that the winner has a consensus among students, but also that they will be able to translate that consensus into a mandate.

But Wednesday's meeting is also noteworthy for what did not happen: The Legislature did not vote on a proposal by Jean-Baptiste to streamline DSG and eliminate gridlock by transforming the organization's structure. Jean-Baptiste has proposed a system where students elect three executive officers who run as a ticket, as opposed to the current system in which six executive officers are elected independently, creating competing visions and disunity. The reason the Legislature never voted on this is because the executive committee stonewalled Jean-Baptiste's initiative, in another example of petty personal politics.

Jean-Baptiste's plan is a significant improvement over the current system. Any observer of DSG over the past 10 years knows that something needs to be done to change DSG, which, despite annual promises of change, faces perpetual problems: lack of a unified vision among executive officers, lack of accountability, little understanding of the organization's role on campus, and few tangible results. Jean-Baptiste's proposal would radically change the organization for the better.

His ideas could be improved, however, if instead of including the executive vice president on the ticket, the Legislature were allowed to choose its own leader. With a president and a chancellor position that overrides the four standing committees, the plan would ensure a unified DSG that could point to end-of-the-year accomplishments, unlike this year's DSG, which, through its pettiness and bickering, has laid bare the worst aspects of undergraduate self-governance.