UA referenda fail due to lack of voters

Most incumbentsMost incumbentswere re-elected Despite recent polls indicating student discontent with the Undergraduate Assembly, 14 of 15 incumbents won their bid for re-election in a vote that saw 25.7 percent of students cast ballots. After a tension-filled Fair Practices Code meeting, which lasted nearly three hours, the Nominations and Elections Committee announced the 24 winners of seats on the 1996-97 Undergraduate Assembly last night. NEC Vice Chairperson for elections Ben Goldberger, an Engineering sophomore, announced that the referendum ballots would not be tallied until Monday. But only 18 percent of students voted on the three referenda on the ballot, rendering all of them invalid no matter what the final vote totals are. The NEC also dropped all charges brought against candidates and the NEC, including five against the NEC proposed by College senior Mike Nadel. Nadel brought charges against the body for allegedly allowing seniors to vote, biasing the elections through unfair summaries of the referenda, preventing people taking three courses from voting, misclassifying referendum one and failing to count blank ballots in the tally of students voting. At the meeting, Nadel agreed to drop the charge for not allowing students with three credits to vote, after the Office of the University Registrar informed him that these students are part-time students and are therefore ineligible to vote. Nadel also agreed to drop his charge pertaining to seniors voting, since he said he does not want the candidates to have to go through another election. Nadel's main charge, the one pertaining to blank ballots, turned out to be irrelevant. Even with the 127 blank ballots the NEC received, 79 more votes would have been needed to equal the 20 percent voter participation rate required for any constitutional referendum to be binding. Nadel, who co-wrote Plan B, said he was upset by the election turnout. "It is sad that the current UA has made everyone so apathetic that people won't even turn out to abolish it," Nadel said. But several UA members expressed their displeasure with the length of the meeting. "To top it all off, we had to miss the new episode of Friends," Wharton senior and UA Vice Chairperson Gil Beverly said. After rejecting Nadel's charges against the NEC, Goldberger announced the results of the elections. Beverly, who received the most votes in his school, will receive an automatic seat on University Council, as will top vote-getters Engineering freshman Michael Bressler, College freshman Courtney Fine and uncontested candidate Nursing sophomore Rebecca Pisano. Four other College students, sophomores Julie Minder, Tal Golomb and Meredith Hertz and freshman Samara Barend, were elected to Council seats. And members of the UA Steering Committee will automatically receive seats. Winning seats in the School of Engineering and Applied Science were sophomores Roman Krislav and John Seitz and freshmen Chris Hyzer and Bressler. The four Wharton seats will go to Beverly, junior incumbent Tom Foldesi, sophomore Jed Prevor and freshman Angela Hsu. Fifteen seats in the College were awarded to incumbent sophomores Tal Golomb, Meredith Hertz, Larry Kamin, Wendy Mongillo, Josh Rockoff and Steve Schorr and incumbent freshmen Samara Barend, Noah Bilenker, Mark Sagat and Fine, the top vote-getter. New College representatives include sophomores Sean Steinmarc, Michael Steib and Julie Minder. Freshmen Hillary Aisenstein and Olivia Troye were also elected. The annual UA transition meeting will be held April 8.