Student Government at UF
From SenatorAdams
The following is a blend of information relating to the real Student Government and how it is depicted in The Mike Adams Series.
Contents |
The Real Organization
Student Government at the University of Florida consists of an executive, judicial, and unicameral legislative branch.
The executive branch consists of a Student Body President, Student Body Vice President, Student Body Treasurer, 9 agencies, and 41 cabinets. The Student Body President, Student Body Vice President, and Student Body Treasurer are elected in annual elections held in the spring. The legislative branch is composed of 94 senators, who serve one year terms. 47 senate seats are elected each spring semester and the remaining 47 are elected each fall semester. The senators elect a Senate President and Senate President Pro Tempore twice a year - once in the fall, and once in the spring - to lead the Student Senate. The judicial branch has three functional components: the Student Supreme Court (headed by a Chief Justice), the Student Honor Court (headed by the Honor Court Chancellor elected each spring), and the Student Traffic Court (headed by a Chief Justice). The student government currently operates on a yearly 13.29 million dollar budget.
Partisanship
Politics on a campus of 50,000 people is very much like politics in a city - where the average voter doesn't care too much except when they might lose something or a popular figure galvanizes an apathetic voting block. But at UF, the campus politics has an added feature: political parties.
These parties aren't the donkeys and elephants found in Washington DC. Rather, these are the labels used every year by the presidential candidates to organize their supporters and a slate of candidates to run with them. (Reportedly, the party system was created so the all-too-often drunk Greeks would know how to vote).
The general thrust of the system is the same, although most of the time the political parties will change names every year to reflect their new presidential candidates. Generally, there is a "Greek party" supported by The Circle and ethnic minorities and an "independent" party backed by engineers and honors students. Every so often you'll get a joke party or a serious third party added to the mix.
In the book, there are several different, albeit long-running political parties:
- Campus Party (backed by The Circle)
- Gator Party
- Alliance Party (Aimee Jackson's merger of elements of both Campus and Gator)
- Students Opposed to Aimee and Richard (abbreviated as SOAR)
As far as ideology is concerned, the parties supported by The Circle tend to be more conservative in outlook; supportive of the Greek system; more deferential to the "adult" authorities on campus and in state and local government; and more free-wheeling in the expense of student money. The opposition tends to be more liberal in outlook; more assertive on student rights, democracy, integrity, and transparency; and while more supportive of funding student groups and activities, the opposition will more often be concerned about wasteful spending within SG itself.
Apportionment in Student Senate
In the series, the Senate is limited to 80 members (much as it was at the real UF up through 2002). The Spring elections elect senators by colleges (for juniors and seniors), as well as freshmen/sophomore/graduate students. The Fall elections determine senators by on-campus dormitories and off-campus districts mapped by zipcode.
At the real UF, the Senate has grown from 80 senators to 94 (47 elected each semester). This has lead to more seats in particular for Graduate Students during the spring election and specific on-campus dormitories during the fall election.
Student Senate Election Oddities
Just as in real life, the UF Student Senate in the series has a unique arrangement for electing senators. Each party can put up as many candidates in a district as the district is allocated seats; each voter can choose as many candidates as there are seats; and the senators elected are those with the most votes.
For example: Arts & Sciences is allocated 5 seats. So the Campus and Gator parties can put up 5 candidates. All 1,000 voters who will cast votes in Arts & Sciences can pick up to 5 Senators to vote for. And no matter how many votes a candidate gets, the top 5 candidates out of the hypothetical 10 will win.
Necessity of a full Slate
This arrangement is unique because most multi-member districts exist in places with a one-person/one-vote principle or in places with proportional representation systems. This arrangement also strongly discourages independents and doubly weakens the effectiveness of parties that lack a complete slate.
For example, let's look at a Journalism election, where that college is allocated 2 seats. Let's assume every voter exercised both of their votes. 90 votes are cast in this fashion:
- John Doe (Campus Party) - 66 votes
- Jane Doe (Campus Party) - 64 votes
- Jamie Smith (Gator Party) - 50 votes
Despite the fact that Gator Party won a majority of the votes cast in the college (50 out of 90), they lost not one but both seats in Journalism. All because their 50 voters used their 2nd vote and crossed party lines to pick one of the hypothetical Doe twins. Let's replay that election, assuming Gator had fielded two candidates:
- Jamie Smith (Gator Party) - 50 votes
- Johnny Smith (Gator Party) - 50 votes
- John Doe (Campus Party) - 41 votes
- Jane Doe (Campus Party) - 39 votes
Assuming the Gator Party's excess 50 votes had instead gone to a second candidate on their slate, rather than being split between the Doe twins, the election changes completely. Instead of electing two Campus Party candidates, Journalism has elected 2 Gator Party Senators. So the Student Senate election system is strongly geared toward parties with full slates - not just a candidate in each district, but a candidate for each seat available.
Rewarding Straight-Ticket Voting
As recently as the real Fall 2005 Student Senate elections, we have seen situations where a close loss is still a loss, even in the large districts.
Hypothetically, let's say you had 5 Campus Party candidates and 5 Gator Party candidates for a District Z. The results were like this:
- Campus 1 - 99 votes
- Campus 2 - 99 votes
- Campus 3 - 98 votes
- Campus 4 - 97 votes
- Campus 5 - 97 votes
- Gator 1 - 91 votes
- Gator 2 - 91 votes
- Gator 3 - 90 votes
- Gator 4 - 89 votes
- Gator 5 - 89 votes
Campus received 490 votes and Gator took 450 votes. Assume we have no one who abstained or under-voted, that means 188 voters cast 940 votes. Campus won 52.13% of the vote, but because both sides held the party-line extremely well, Campus swept all 5 seats!
Let's re-run this scenario, but let's say Gator Party ran a well-liked candidate that the campus newspaper tracked during the campaign. Let's say he took 10 votes from Campus for himself and coattailed 2-3 extra votes for the rest of his slate:
- Gator 1 - 101 votes
- Campus 1 - 95 votes
- Campus 2 - 95 votes
- Campus 3 - 94 votes
- Campus 4 - 93 votes
- Campus 5 - 93 votes
- Gator 2 - 93 votes
- Gator 3 - 93 votes
- Gator 4 - 92 votes
- Gator 5 - 91 votes
The new result is 470 votes for both parties (50.00% each). Yet, because the top Gator candidate pulled more votes for himself then he did for the whole slate, Campus still wins 4 seats and Gator wins only 1. Note: the 4th Campus seat is technically a tie between 4 candidates, two in both parties. Tie breakers are broken in a vote among the rest of new Senate, a partisan outcome that always favors the majority party. So, in the end, the Campus Party will pick up a 4-1 win in this district.
Uphill battle?
But, even in my last example, the minority party can overcome the majority party when they use celebrity candidates. Rarely, however, does an outcome in these multiple-seat districts come out proportional - indeed, they are much more likely to be an all-or-nothing affair unless the outcome is close.
Thus, one has to be careful about overperforming in your "base" districts and not doing well elsewhere. In the real Spring 2001 election, the minority SUN party won just 14 seats (35% of the total) despite losing the Student Body President race by just 16 votes (resulting in just 49.90% of the vote) after a recount. We even had a Student Body President elected in 2002 on a 51%-46% margin, yet her party lost the Senate majority 19-20 (with 1 tie to be decided later).
A weak Senate slate doesn't prevent a presidential candidate from winning, but a weak slate can hurt the Senate candidates in multi-member districts. And the stronger/fuller your slate is, the more likely your party can win seats and pull in extra votes for your campus-wide candidates.
Other groups on campus
In the series, a number of other groups exist that are tangentially related to the Student Government.
- Academic Council
- The Circle
