With 12 resolutions and three amendments on the table, yesterday’s Student Assembly meeting was a packed legislative session. The focus, however, surrounded discussion of Resolution 30, which proposes a number of changes to the S.A.’s Election Guidelines.

The most controversial change that Resolution 30 would implement is the splitting up of “slates” in the presidential and vice presidential S.A. elections, according to At-Large S.A. Representative Nikki Junewicz ’10. Under the current rules, candidates for president and vice president must run on a slate. Junewicz, however, said she believes that candidates should run on their own merit and desire to serve rather than their ability to find a running mate.

In addition to the elimination of slates, Junewicz said, “The other big change was the [addition of] the hare system, which is a ranked voting system — the same one that they use for the student trustee position — and the reason we’d like to adopt this for the Student Assembly is because it lets the students’ votes count more.”

The S.A. will vote on the Election Guidelines changes next week. While the guidelines themselves will require only a simple majority to pass, the hare system involves a charter change and thus will require a two-thirds majority.

“Last year we ran into some problems with students who ran independently [for] at-large positions because students who ran on slates had an advantage because they got all their own votes plus all the votes of the people who voted for the other person [on their slate],” she said.

“Students who ran independently were competing against students who ran on slates and [because] students who ran on slates got all their own votes plus all their running mate’s, that made it impossible for students who ran for an At-Large seat and weren’t running on a slate as President or Executive Vice President to run. Students who ran on slates had a huge total vote count advantage over students who ran on their own,” she added.

S.A. President Rammy Salem, ’10 also expressed support for the changes.

“Individuals should be motivated to run based on their individual merit and not the merits of their running mate,” he said. “I think the slates that were attempted last year were flawed in that they gave an unfair advantage to the [students running on] slates as opposed to people who chose to run as undergraduate at-large members.

Instead of allowing students to vote for one candidate per position, undergraduate voters would be able to rank, by order of preference, all of the candidates running for the at-large positions.

“What we’re proposing is that it’s three separate rankings so you can have the opportunity to rank all the people who run for President, all the people who run for executive vice president and all the people who run for the two undergraduate at-large representative seats,” Junewicz explained.

The hare ranking system will only be for the at-large race, she added.

Salem similarly approved of the new ranking system: “I think that the hare system ensures that [the election] is not just a popularity contest,” he said. “Even if you vote for your best friend first, you might still rank the candidates you think are most deserving in second and third.”

There is some hesitancy about making such significant changes so soon after implementing the popular election of the S.A.’s top two executive positions, according to Salem. “I think that point is valid because I believe there should be more of a testing-out period for us to figure out the scope of potential problems. But, it did create a problem because essentially what it did was elect [only] candidates for the top two seats to [all] the at-large seats. Since there were two people campaigning twice as hard it was sort of unfair as evinced by the results of the election.”