After 47 years, USC students can once again pass referendums
The decision was made in last night’s meeting where USG also voted against the anti-discrimination amendment
On Tuesday evening, the Undergraduate Senate voted for a bylaws proposal reintegrating the student body’s ability to pass referendums, an act which has fallen out of USG authorization for over four decades.
Now students may propose referendums to be enacted on USG electoral ballots via a petition presented by one tenth of the eligible undergraduate student body and followed by a two thirds majority decision of the Undergraduate Senate.
For a referendum to pass, it must be approved by a simple majority of the population which votes on it.
Although the proposal must be approved by both the Associate Director of Elections as well as the Judicial Council to verify constitutionality, a select number of USG senators feared the future ramifications of allowing a potential minority of the student body being able to bypass administrative jurisdiction to impose the proposal of a few onto the will of the many. For this reason, Sen. Daniel Newman proposed the following amendment: “Referendums shall not be used to denounce other countries.”
The amendment failed 7-5, with Senators Newman, Josh Lurie, Tiffany Lian, Leena Danpour and Alanna Schenk in favor and Sabrina Enriquez, Kate Oh, Tyler Matheson, Paul Samaha , Emily Lee, Daniel Million and Tingyee Chang against the vote.
“While USG is non-partisan, referendums currently aren’t,” said Newman while defending the amendment from a vocal crowd largely opposing the proposal. While referendums will be mandatory for ballots, including the votes for USG executive positions and senators, to be counted, they could theoretically be passed with only a ten percent vote of the student body if a mere twenty percent of undergraduates turned out to vote in spring elections.
“Something that will bypass the jurisdiction of the administration and will effect the entire student body should be something that a sizable portion of students want,” added Danpour, who also noted that USC’s 15 percent international undergraduates could potentially feel marginalized if a referendum, to employ Newman’s terminology, denounced another country.
The meeting attendees remained unimpressed with the amendment, with last year’s Senate candidate David Delgado telling Danpour he felt “offended that you don’t care about my other identities, just what country I come from.”
“The reason that this amendment was proposed is because referendums have been used to denounce other countries, so it’s not that I don’t care about your other identities,” said Danpour. The senators advocating for the amendment pointed towards recent BDS measures approved by private universities such as DePaul and Wesleyan as an example of such measures.
“Can I just say that besides countries and nationalities, many of my identities are being denied every day on this campus,” said Sen. Oh. “Let’s say you’re a black student on this campus and you enter a classroom and there’s only white students.”
Another attendee, Lynn Wang, called the amendment, “a little suspect on principle.”
Ultimately the resolution without the amendment passed, paving the way for a previously non-partisan undergraduate student government to allow political referendums to pass in the coming years.