Members of the Government of the Student Body Constitutional Convention are leaving a hot issue in the hands of the students.

On April 17-25, students will vote not only to ratify or turn down the new GSB Constitution, but also to decide the fate of specialty seats in the Senate.

It wasn’t long after the convention meeting began Sunday night that members were close to signing the proposed constitution.

But the meeting took an unexpected turn when the draft was voted down on a vote of 7-7. The draft needed a two-thirds approval in order to pass.

After a debate on special seats, a compromise was reached.

An edited draft was then passed on vote of 11-0-3. In the new draft, specialty seats are maintained, but there will be an option on the ratification ballot to vote to remove the seats.

Convention Chairman Jamey Hansen, a senior in elementary education, said the sticking point was that some delegates disagreed with the definition of specialty seats in the draft.

Specialty-seat debate

“It’s insulting to those groups to say that they need a special seat to be represented,” said John Hamilton, a convention delegate. “I think it’s racist and prejudiced.”

A compromise was reached when delegates decided to submit a split ballot.

The ballot will feature two questions. The first will ask students to approve the draft of the constitution as written.

The second will ask students if they support keeping specialty seats intact in the event that the constitution passes.

Hansen said if the specialty seats are eliminated, senators elected to those positions for next year will not be seated.

“I think most students are opposed to specialty seats,” Hamilton said. “They are the silent majority. Even if the motion to get rid of specialty seats fails, it will be because the vocal minority is the group that gets out and votes.”

Either way, Hansen said he believes the split ballot will encourage a greater voter turnout.

Convention delegates join late

Some delegates turned up at Sunday’s meeting having not attended the majority of the convention’s meetings.

“I thought it was totally insulting to members of the convention. We had a handful of people come in and say, ‘You’re wrong; we’re right,'” said Michel Pogge, a convention delegate. “They were total outsiders who have spent their own time on their own piece of paper.”

Mark Nimmer, a delegate who did not attend many meetings, said his absence was a matter of academics getting in the way. “We’ve been listening all along, but we haven’t had time to be at the meetings,” he said.

The Constitutional Convention has met regularly since September. Most meetings were held without a quorum.

The majority of the work amending the draft, which was written by Hansen with the help of other GSB senators, was done by the committee the week prior to Sunday’s vote.

Campuswide elections

Hansen said delegates will place a full-page advertisement in Wednesday’s Daily to present the draft of the constitution to students.

“I just hope people will take a look at it and vote on it. We need to know how people stand on this,” Pogge said.

Students will be able to vote at a variety of yet undetermined sites. The ratification process requires a 20 percent turnout of the student body, which means about 4,700 students will need to vote to make it a valid election. A simple majority is needed to ratify the constitution.

If passed, the new constitution will go into effect immediately.

Changes

“The first thing you’ll notice is that the new one is half as long,” Hansen said.

The current constitution was written about 20 years ago.

Hansen said convention delegates did some “cleaning up” of the constitution — making some points more concise and eliminating some information that would fit more appropriately in the GSB Bylaws.

The bylaws will be changed by next year’s GSB early in the fall semester. They will have to be revised according to the constitution.

While the new constitution is only six pages, the bylaws are about 40 pages long. Because of the time that it will take to rewrite the bylaws, Hansen said some GSB members will meet in a special summer session to get started.

While a number of constitutional changes were proposed, only a few will likely have a direct impact on students.

Hansen said the single most important constitutional change is the addition of Article VIII: Powers of the Student Body.

Hansen said under the old constitution, the wording was so sloppy that it actually appeared as though its intent was to discourage students from amending the constitution or removing a senator or executive officer.

Under the new draft, a student needs a petition of 20 percent of the student body to call a special election within three weeks to amend the constitution.

To prompt a recall election a student needs a petition of 20 percent of the constituency.

“The Powers of the Student Body clause is the biggest selling point to students,” Hansen said.

In other changes, the vice president would no longer chair the Senate if the constitution is passed. A speaker of the Senate, who would be appointed by the Senate, would chair the meetings.

Students can take a look at the new constitution on the Internet at http://www.iastate.edu/~stu_org/GSB/convention.