USAC to form review committee after meeting on divestment resolution

UCLA’s undergraduate student government decided to form a committee Tuesday to review last week’s meeting regarding a divestment resolution and make suggestions for the best procedures the council should follow if faced with such a controversial vote again.

The committee would discuss councilmember concerns, including how to handle outside media organizations, how long public comments should run and how voting and councilmember safety should be addressed.

Last week, the Undergraduate Students Association Council voted down a controversial divestment resolution with a 5-7-0 secret ballot vote.

The resolution called for UCLA and the University of California to divest from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. More than 500 students showed up to the meeting and students gave public comments for almost nine hours. The meeting lasted almost 12 hours, from 7 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.

At the USAC meeting Tuesday, multiple councilmembers said they thought the Feb. 25 meeting was run “sloppily” and that councilmembers should have considered the procedure more prior to its start.

Councilmembers chose to use a secret ballot after some of them received threats and hate mail relating to the resolution. The council was split when it voted to use secret ballots, but USAC President John Joanino broke the tie to allow the anonymous vote.

Before the secret ballot decision, councilmembers took two straw votes, pushed for by Joanino, to gauge where councilmembers stood and see if they were willing to make amendments to the resolution.

After the meeting, some councilmembers said they did not think the secret ballot kept their votes private, because they had just taken two straw votes and no councilmembers had publicly changed their positions during the discussion.

“This entire notion of secrecy … seemed a bit misplaced after two straw votes,” said Sunny Singh, a USAC general representative.

Student Wellness Commissioner Savannah Badalich initially suggested using a secret ballot at the meeting. Some councilmembers had alreadyplanned for the possibility of voting privately and asked Patricia Zimmerman, the student government services manager, to print out paper ballots, which she brought to the meeting.

Tuesday’s conversation about ballots led to a larger discussion about how the meeting should have been organized.

USAC External Vice President Maryssa Hall said she thinks USAC should debrief the divestment meeting in an effort to evaluate which parts of it went right or wrong.

Campus Events Commissioner Jessica Kim said she thinks councilmembers should have met before the meeting to plan it out and be more prepared.

Both Kim and Sam Haws, a general representative, said they thought the councilmembers’ discussion was rushed after nine hours of public comments.

“I heard more about (the) legality of secret ballots than why people were voting the way they did,” Haws said Tuesday about the divestment resolution discussion.

Joanino said he plans to choose which councilmembers will form the committee sometime this week.

Join the Conversation

2 Comments

  1. What?????

    USAC needs to form a review as to whether it should exist and whether it has a right to try to comment on the matters like this. These scumbags need to do something for the students and stop delving into such issues, issues in which it does not have all the facts and are very complex. But all these USAC members are NOT here to help students. They are to help themselves and use issues to milk publicity. Lizzy Naameh is the perfect example.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *