Recalling Common Sense

Last month, the people of California flexed their electoral muscle and got rid of one of the Golden State’s least-popular politicians, the aptly-named Gray Davis. But at Harvard, we’re basically stuck with our elected incompetents. Representatives on the Undergraduate Council are protected by prohibitively excessive recall rules that do nothing to increase accountability.

One-tenth of the students in a council district must sign a petition in order to initiate a recall election. Then, a two-thirds majority must vote to actually remove the representative. If the turnout in this recall election is less than the turnout in the last general election, nothing happens.

So, basically, it is impossible for students to successfully recall someone. In the past 10 years, not a single representative has been removed via the recall provisions of the council’s Constitution. Even on occasions when its officers have been stripped of their positions, the representatives have retained their seat on the council itself.

Contrast this with the council’s internal procedures for expelling a representative.

Accumulate too many absences and you could find yourself summarily removed from the council. Or suppose 10 members submit a petition for recall. No particular requirement of turnout beyond a bare quorum is required for the council to remove you from office.

At least two things need to change. First, the two-thirds vote requirement is too stringent, and should be relaxed. The typical council representative during the last general election was elected with two or three dozen first-place votes out of a turnout of about 100. A suitably intransigent voting bloc could collude to keep their favored representative in office even if the majority of the district desired otherwise, but could not muster the requisite supermajority.

Second, the requirement that the recall turnout equals the turnout in the original election stacks the deck in favor of incumbents, and it should be scrapped. The general elections bear the imprimatur of the Undergraduate Council, our nominally representative student government. The elections themselves are promoted ad nauseum by the council and a compliant press—not to mention exhortations to vote from hopeful candidates. A recall election could not hope to get this much free publicity. Representatives facing removal need not even defend themselves against the charges leveled against them in order to survive the recall. In fact, it would be to their benefit to ignore the issue entirely and hope that too few people will bother voting for the results to count.

Recall elections should be binding if the turnout exceeds either some fraction of the turnout from the first election or a lesser fraction of the total population of the district. If this turnout is not achieved, the appropriate response should be to hold elections again, not to dismiss the recall petition as merely reflecting some fickle and unimportant whim.

Were the Undergraduate Council truly interested in transparency, it would scale back these unassailable barriers to accountability. It makes no sense to allow the council to recall its members so easily, yet prevent its constituents from exercising that same power with impossible recall rules.

—Brian J. Wong is an editorial editor.