Twelve seats for twelve candidates: are elections even necessary?
The 2023 student council elections began this week. The likelihood that seats will remain unoccupied within some faculties is plausible. But how bad is that really?
There are more seats than candidates on the list. This has been a real problem in UvA student council elections for years, especially at the faculty level. But what if there are just enough candidates to fill all available seats? Wouldn’t it then be better to give all candidates a spot on the council immediately, without elections potentially throwing a spanner in the works?
That is the question the Central Voting Committee had to consider recently at the instigation of three parties (LIEF, The Fouding Students, and STEM). Together with the Activist Party, they delegated just enough candidates within the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Science to fill all available seats. Twelve, in fact.
For this reason, the three parties wanted to call off the elections within their districts. After all, when a party wins more seats than it has candidates on its list, these seats remain vacant - even if other parties still have candidates (who did not receive enough votes for a seat) on their list. Together, the parties wanted to prevent seats from being left permanently vacant. But the Activist Party distanced itself from the plan because they believe that the democratic process should be central. If seats remain unoccupied, that’s less of a problem, according to them.
Portfolio distribution
If there had been unanimity, “the request could have been approved,” the Central Electoral Bureau states in its official decision. After all, this also happened last year when the MFAS Bachelor Party and The Free Student jointly nominated exactly enough students for the faculty council at Medicine. What is striking, however, is that the Elections Regulations, which set out the rules surrounding elections to the CSR and FSR, have not provided for such an arrangement since 2014.
Before that year, Article 31 of the Electoral Regulations still allowed for seats to be distributed among parties without prior elections in the event of precisely enough candidates. But this was subsequently removed from the regulations at the request of the then Central Student Council (CSR).
According to the SRC, the number of votes each candidate obtained in the elections would help in the subsequent portfolio allocation. Candidates with many votes could then more easily claim a (more important) portfolio of their choice.
LEEF and Party MFAS
Until 2020, this did not cause any problems, says Jacqueline Groot Antink, secretary of the Central Electoral Bureau. “But that changed for the first time in 2021 when at the Bachelor of Medicine, only two parties, LEEF and Party MFAS, with two and five candidates respectively, competed for seven seats, respectively.” They had not asked the Central Ballot Office to allocate seats in advance and omit elections.
“Because the MFAS Party was allocated six seats based on the election results and the party had only five candidates, one seat remained unoccupied,” Groot Antink said. The result? With pre-2014 rules, Stan de Ronde (then number two on LEEF’s list) would have gone directly into the Faculty Council, but because of the rule change (2014), he missed out on that seat in 2021. “The risk of unoccupied seats increases as the pool of candidates becomes smaller,” Groot Antink said.
Sometimes there is no escape: seats will always remain unoccupied if there are too few candidates on the list. This year that is the case with the Faculty of Humanities, where the Activist Party has put forward too few candidates (9) for the 12 seats available. No other parties are running in the elections at Humanities, so three seats will remain unoccupied.
UvA students can vote for both the Central Student Council and the Faculty Student Council of their own course of study from May 8-12. Check out the explainer below on exactly how the co-determination process works.
