These regulations are a step in the wrong direction: with unnecessary regulations, making it harder for those who aren’t already involved in OUSU to take part, and removing important safeguards to ensure fairness.
Perhaps the two greatest changes are coming to the way we elect NUS Delegates to represent us at NUS conference. These have been occasioned by the NUS’ decision to introduce gender quotas for delegations from universities – now, instead of electing five, we have to elect 6, and at least three have to self-identify as women. The most important problem this creates is deciding on an electoral system that both keeps the students’ votes equal and ensures that (at least) the necessary number of women are elected.
However, the draft changes leave the electoral system for NUS unspecified. So, unlike all the other positions, it’s not clear from the outset how students’ votes will be counted. Instead of being explicitly regulated, Council will make policy for this purpose at some future point. There’s a technical distinction here: election regulations require two votes (at different meetings) and a two-thirds majority to change, whereas Council policy requires only a simple majority at one meeting. If a slate thought that they would gain an advantage under a different system than the one initially proposed, it would be much easier for them to ‘stuff’ OUSU Council and change the system in the run-up to elections.
Yes, designing an appropriate system is hard, but other parts of the NUS already have systems that meet our requirements – we should specify the system in regulation.
The other effect of leaving the system for Council policy is that it becomes much harder for a student who doesn’t know their way around OUSU’s governing documents and policies to work out what she can expect if she wants to stand for NUS delegate.
Since representation of students is the reason OUSU exists, it shouldn’t be making standing to represent students any harder than it needs to be.
The second is that, the number of NUS delegates that ‘slates’ – the groups of candidates who campaign for each other – can put forward is reduced from 5 to 4, despite the number of positions to be elected increasing from 5 to 6. This is an unwarranted restriction on student choice: slates form along policy lines and it’s not possible for slates to campaign for one another. So if, for instance, students really wanted to send 6 far-left delegates, or 6 centre-right delegates, or 6 ‘gin-and-tonic’ delegates, they’d be unable to because of the restrictions on slate size.
Another change I believe is particularly unfair is a change which would allow the Returning Officer (RO), the person running the elections, to disqualify candidates in certain circumstances.
If a candidate completes their nomination in the wrong way, and the RO doesn’t spot this and approves the nomination, this can lead to candidates running who, for whatever reason, shouldn’t have been able to run. Something like this happened in 2013, but instead of the RO disqualifying the candidate, the question was referred to an independent external panel.
Decisions to disqualify candidates are always contentious and should be considered by people who are removed from the day-to-day running of the election so that a proper sense of perspective is maintained. It is for this reason that the RO, currently, has no power to disqualify candidates in any circumstance. But the change does give the RO this power.
What is worse, it gives the RO this power to disqualify and does not give the candidate a right of appeal. This is particularly unfair since candidates who seemingly nominated successfully would have invested considerable time and perhaps money into their campaign, leaving them possibly out-of-pocket and behind in their academic work with no way of reviewing the case at OUSU.
Those who propose it say that this will make adjudication of certain complaints quicker: they are, of course, right. But in speeding up the process, they’re violating important principles that secured the fairness of these regulations.
There are lots of other small things in the regulation changes that aren’t good for OUSU as well. For instance, the regulations that govern how campaigns can engage with media are going to be kept as ‘directions’ (instructions the RO makes at the beginning of the election) rather than be put as regulation. But the direction is unlikely to change year-to-year.
In the same way as the NUS voting system, this gives an unfair advantage to people who already know OUSU well, since they will know roughly what sort of conduct is expected, whereas people coming in won’t. But there are lots of other small changes – some good, some bad – but the overall, the changes mark a step in the wrong direction.
Why do I think that? What’s the headline reason to oppose these changes? These changes make elections easier for OUSU, broadly construed: not only the people running the election, but also for the people who regularly attend OUSU Council, the people who are already building their slates and the people who know how OUSU works.
For the people who are more distant from OUSU – which are most Oxford students, given how few ever turn up to OUSU Council or vote in elections – they make it harder to understand what’s going on, harder to get involved, and harder to tell OUSU what it might not want to hear. And in some cases, the changes have prioritised ease of running the election over fairness.
I know it’s trite, but I really do believe in direct election as one of the most effective ways for ordinary students to get their union doing what they want; elections should never be simply a ritual we go through as painlessly as possible to legitimise the status quo. But for direct election to be effective for this purpose, it needs to be fair, accessible, and as unrestrictive as possible. The changes to the regulations are a step the other way.
These new electoral regulations will make it harder for students to tell OUSU and the NUS what they think and disadvantage candidates running from outside the current OUSU crowd. We should ask OUSU to think again about these changes.
