OSPIRG Canvassing For Ballot Measure
Probably recognizing they will be unable to receive a contract for the 2011-12 fiscal year, the Oregon Students Public Interest Research Group is on campus collecting signatures for a ballot measure to appear during the ASUO election during weeks one and two of spring term. The text of the ballot measure is as follows:
Should the ASUO fund the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) at a level that allows OSPIRG to hire professional staff to advocate on behalf of students locally, statewide, and nationally in places like the State Legislature and Congress?
OSPIRG is a statewide, student-directed and funded organization that strives to fulfill the public service mission of the University by combining student activism and professional staff to do advocacy, organizing and research for the public interest on campus, statewide and nationally to lower healthcare costs, stop global warming, protect public health, make textbooks more affordable, and increase public transit. OSPIRG is controlled by an all-student Board of Directors.
A YES vote is a non-binding statement that the ASUO should fund OSPIRG at a level that allows OSPIRG to hire professional staff to advocate on behalf of students locally, statewide, and nationally in places like the State Legislature and Congress on issues such as those described above.
A NO vote is a non-binding statement that the ASUO should not fund an OSPIRG program, as described above.
First of all, this is the exact same ballot measure that was on the ballot last year. Word for word.
Regardless, another ballot measure is simultaneously shady and smart: shady because that description of OSPIRG doesn’t actually outline what OSPIRG does with their budget, and smart because ballot measures generally pass due to student apathy and ignorance when there is no organized opposition force, and there hasn’t been an organized opposition force for OSPIRG beside the Oregon Commentator in a while.* Additionally, if they keep the measure on the ballot every year and support increases, they have a case for “increased student support.” (More like increased student apathy, but whatever.)
See, ballot measures are tricky. According to the Clark Document (the document signed by the University president that gives the ASUO its authority) and the Southworth decision (which regards mandatory student fee funding), incidental fee decisions cannot be made by referendum, but referenda can “assess the level of student support for a program” and “serve to provide supplemental, non-binding guidance to the appropriate branch of student government, but in doing so may not establish or take measure of support for any specific funding level.” It’s basically a poll of student support.
Unfortunately, it’s an incredibly unscientific and inaccurate one. Voter turnout in ASUO elections — including those who have all but one under-vote — was about 20 percent last year, a much higher number than years previous but still a relatively small amount of students. Therefore, although support for the OSPIRG ballot measure was 51.69 percent of those who voted on the measure, those 2,121 people represent 9.22 percent of the student population.
Do the 4,103 students who bothered to pay attention to the OSPIRG ballot measure on Duckweb — about 18 percent of the entire student population — constitute a representative sample of the entire student population? Absolutely not. Ask any statistician and he or she will agree: a ballot measure that requires signing in and voting on a bunch of other races before making it to the measure deters a majority of students for a variety of reasons.
Are there other ways to gauge student opinion? Sure, but none as simple to implement as an online poll. And if it works for you, as it does for OSPIRG, then why rock the boat?
OSPIRG has tried to take advantage of the ballot measure situation before. During the 2008-09 school year, the PIRG kids, under the guise of a Coalition for Student Voice, tried to get a measure on the ballot that did not explicitly mention OSPIRG but cited support of student voice. Logical extension there, of course, leads that if a student is in support of “student voice,” he or she would be in support of OSPIRG, because OSPIRG represents student voice. The ballot measure was removed by the group due to the ensuing controversy, as student programs (and ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz) were concerned of the implications if the measure did not pass.
OSPIRG has a relative advantage right now, because they are the ones defining what their group does. Here is my alternative, proposed description:
OSPIRG is a state-wide organization with a very close relationship to another organization with the same name: the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group. That OSPIRG is also a nonprofit, but with a different tax designation: The student PIRG (as a 510(c)(3) IRS tax designated nonprofit) can receive state (incidental fee) funds, but cannot lobby; the state PIRG (as a 501(c)(4) IRS tax designated nonprofit) can engage in lobbying, but is then exempt from receiving state funds (which include the incidental fee). The two organizations have the same executive director, share office space in Portland and pay for the same lobbyists in Salem to work on the same priority issues. Almost every Oregon university has defunded its OSPIRG chapter, save for Southern Oregon University and Lane Community College. OSPIRG has been defunded on the University of Oregon campus for two consecutive years, and was also defunded in 1998 for one year following an aggressive campaign spearheaded by the Oregon Commentator. The only campus-focused issue OSPIRG works on is lower textbook prices, and they have not been successful in reducing that burden on students. Instead, they want to take more money from you as one of the largest budgets the ASUO works with ($117,000).
According to Section 15 of the Green Tape Notebook (ASUO Constitution and governing documents), in order for the measure to appear on the ballot, the PIRG needs to collect signatures of 5 percent of the student population: around 1,200 students. I have no doubt that’ll happen; it’s easy enough to convince 1,200 students to do something, especially when you don’t give them the whole story.
Extra credit: OC Editor Emeritus CJ Ciaramella breaks down OSPIRG’s sordid UO history in “The Whole, Ugly Scoop On OSPIRG.” Similarly, the Oregon Daily Emerald ran a piece around the same time, titled “The OSPIRG You Can’t See,” by legend Ryan Knutson. Read the whole thing. It’s pretty fantastic.
*During the last ASUO election, the Reality Check slate held one anti-OSPIRG demonstration that was at least partly responsible for an almost 50-50 split on OSPIRG’s last ballot measure.
