This Bwog post on the school-by-school ROTC breakdown raises more questions than it answers. Writing a list is an unforgivably poor substitute for writing a real blog post, but it’s exam week and I’m in a hurry, soooo:

-Does this mean that votes actually were divided by UNI?

-If they were divided by UNI, why was there no effort made to contact voters who votes might have been compromised?

-There was a 2-2 split among the individual schools; if you divvy it out proportionally there would be 2 votes in favor of ROTC (one from GS and one from SEAS’ undergraduate representative)  and 4 votes against (1 from Barnard and 3 from CC).

But if you separated the votes to reflect the percentages Bwog provided, there would be 3 votes in favor of ROTC (one each from GS, SEAS and a CC Senator) and 3 votes against (Barnard and 2 of the CC representatives). Since the survey was held in order to advise the undergraduate senators in how to vote on ROTC’s return to campus, isn’t there a certain obligation for the senate to hear this issue out? Does a (partially) democratically-elected university senate care as little about the democratic process as the (completely) democratically-elected George Krebs?

-From whom did Bwog get this information? Whoever it is, there’s an obvious question of why he/she/they didn’t release it a week ago–before the senate had declared the ROTC issue dead. The councils seem just incompetent enough to not bother to tell anyone that the vote had actually been divided by school–or worse, to not see its immediate relevance to one of the biggest issues on campus…

Last week’s ROTC survey was a fraud perpetrated upon the student body by the student councils and the Student Development Office. I’m not referring to the question of whether a pro-ROTC vote of any margin would have convinced the University Senate to reexamine an issue it probably feels it settled a long time ago. There’s a much more mundane challenge to the legitimacy of last week’s poll: simply, it was in no way a fair or secure vote, and no one should accept it as such.

In a GS-wide email sent shortly after survey results were released last Tuesday, GS president Brody Berg wrote:

4905 votes were recorded
One person voted 276 times
And “after eliminating the duplicates and matching the unique IDs with our records, 2971 unduplicated votes are determined as ‘valid.’”

(All this information is from Columbia College Student Development and Activities Adviser David Cheng)

What this means is that there were nearly 2000 votes thrown out of a race decided by only 39 total votes. More votes were thrown out than the individual size of three out of the four colleges in the survey. Furthermore, the votes thrown out were done with no supervision and with a fraud detection strategy only as good as “eliminating duplicates and matching unique IDs.”

Crucially, Berg does not tell us why these votes were determined to be “invalid.” We’re left to assume one of three possibilities:

-People were allowed to submit more than one vote, and these votes were counted as “valid” by the system used to tabulate them.

Now in the case of votes that were changed a suspicious number of times, it is impossible to discern whether the vote actually reflects the wishes of the person who supposedly cast it. Indeed, unless that particular person had a bout of particularly schizophrenic soul-searching during the week of the poll, an ID number that has voted a suspicious number of times has by definition been tampered with or compromised.

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In an e-mail, SEAS University Senator Rajat Roy has informed me that results as they have been announced “are not binding for CC and GS senators” because of the fact that the exact vote breakdown is yet unknown. It is appearing increasingly that, regardless of the breakdown, they may not even hold themselves to it due to voting irregularities.

Roy added that “SEAS senators aren’t bound until [the breakdown is announced] and until the graduate students get a voice.”

Perhaps most interestingly, he contradicted statements by other student government officials—including SGA President Sara Besnoff—who have said that ROTC “will be discussed in the University Senate.”  Roy stated quite flatly that “the senate won’t hear this issue” and added that  “nothing has changed.”

I am not surprised.

Just got in touch with CCSC president George Krebs, who is taking a much different line on the ROTC results than his GS counterpart:

CCSC considers the survey “valid.” As I explained in my student body e-mail, each UNI was allowed one vote, and although there were some votes that changed multiple times, only the last valid vote cast was counted. We have been assured by the Student Development office, the office that oversaw and compiled the results, that the results were collected in a fair manner, free of fraudulence. We stand by the results, and the methods, of the survey.

I e-mailed to ask him why the councils used a polling method that allowed votes to be changed while disallowing a final submission of individual ballots. His response:

This method was the one presented to us by the SDA. After we published this poll, we continued to stand by it. It may not have been perfect, but it is the method we choose to stick with.

As I wrote about an hour and a half ago, there are problems with Berg’s assertion that a vote is invalid simply because it has been changed. Then again, the volume of changed votes suggests that the councils could have something of a problem on their hands.

All of which obscures the fact that this was an incredibly close vote and that, at a campus with over 5,000 undergrads, a 39-vote win for either side is essentially meaningless.

EDIT: Wow, that’s some paper-thin analysis right there. This obviously wasn’t “meaningless”: at the minimum it means that ROTC probably doesn’t stand a chance in the University Senate, and will likely be a dead issue until “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is repealed. And even then…

Also, in my mind, the fact that any of the council presidents believe the results to be invalid proves just how idiotic the polling methods were. That there is any controversy whatsoever over the survey’s integrity—that it’s being questioned at all—is a reflection of mind-blowingly poor planning. And it’s unfortunate that a re-vote looks worse for the councils than the current, potentially tainted results do, and that controversy over the councils’ rubber-stamp of the SDA’s flawed voting methods probably won’t outlast the week…

Not according to GSSC president Brody Berg. After breaking news of NROTC’s narrow defeat, Berg explained how the results ”get interesting”:

4905 votes were recorded
One person voted 276 times
And “after eliminating the duplicates and matching the unique IDs with our records, 2971 unduplicated votes are determined as ‘valid.’”

(All this information is from Columbia College Student Development and Activities Adviser David Cheng)

What this means is that there were nearly 2000 votes thrown out of a race decided by only 39 total votes. More votes were thrown out than the individual size of three out of the four colleges in the survey. Furthermore, the votes thrown out were done with no supervision and with a fraud detection strategy only as good as “eliminating duplicates and matching unique IDs.”

Now, let me be clear: even though I personally voted no, I believe that this poll result is meaningless due to the huge number of apparently fraudulent votes. I say this out of common sense and because, as a software industry veteran of 10 years and senior in the computer science department, my professional gut feeling tells me that a significant number of fraudulent votes may not have been removed.

I was quoted in the Columbia Spectator on September 26th as saying, “My number one thing from the very beginning was to assess student opinion on NROTC in a fair manner.” In the General Studies student body we are proud to have a lot of students on both sides of this issue. Even though the side I support “won,” due to the huge number of fraudulent votes, myself and the Executive Board of the General Studies Student Council believe both General Studies and the Columbia community at large would be better served on this controversial issue with a poll whose results we can trust.”

Still waiting on word from ESC and CCSC, although, as Noah Baron pointed out a couple of days ago, this wouldn’t be the only time the councils have flubbed crucial ROTC survey-related matters…

EDIT: Admittedly, this email is really freaking confusing—Berg says that 2000 votes were “thrown out,” but that some of the ones that were actually cast are “fraudulent.” Indeed, it takes a pretty close reading to realize that the 2000 he’s referring to are changed votes, which, by his reading, render the final total invalid. So if you changed your vote, Berg would count your initial decision as one “thrown out” vote and your final decision as “invalid”—I’m not sure I buy the argument that this delegitimizes the entire survey, but the fact that one vote was changed over 200 times raises some questions that need answering over the next couple of days.

Now, it’s pretty obvious whose vote was changed that many times. Nevertheless, the fact that this was even possible at all should put the councils in a pretty awkward spot…

More analysis—and hopefully some clarity—is on its way…

For all those wondering when we’ll be notified of the results, they should be sent out in the class e-mails later tonight, at around 3 a.m. Apparently results are already in for GS, CC, and SEAS. As of 11 p.m., the Councils were waiting on Barnard before informing everyone. We’ll keep you posted.

1. Continued lack of transparency — Despite the perennial promise of “more transparency” in the mysterious workings of the student councils, those promises have remain largely unfulfilled. In a Bwog comment, someone on one of the student councils claimed that meeting minutes have been posted online, but the vast majority of students clearly remain unaware as to how to locate that website. Furthermore, the last time I checked, the FEC and CCSC websites had not been updated in years.

2. The ROTC Vote — The student councils bungled the ROTC vote big time, and in almost every way possible. The whole vote started out on the wrong foot when the councils held a meeting in which they specifically excluded various anti-war groups and Everyone Allied Against Homophobia–after inviting them! The only member of the Policy Committee present (to my knowledge) was Adil, and class policy directors only knew as much as the rest of the student body. To make things worse, the councils wavered back and forth on not only how many town halls to have, but also whether or not to have town hall meetings at all.

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Look—people can oppose ROTC for whatever goddamn reason they choose. But let’s not pretend that there aren’t some reasons that are (by my very biased reading, at least) completely ridiculous:

We, the undersigned, stand strongly opposed to the introduction of ROTC on Columbia’s campus. In contrast to those who have expressed support for ROTC based on hypothetical conditions, we recognize that any position on ROTC must be grounded in the present. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is official policy and exceptions cannot be negotiated. While the extent of our opposition varies, we all agree that at this time ROTC has no place on our campus.

Gee, didn’t Mahmood Mamdani write an article in the London Review of Books using a hypothetical US invasion of the Sudan to argue against the use of sanctions or UN peacekeepers in Darfur? Didn’t Hamid Dabashi write a hysterical tract in Al Ahram castigating Hilary Clinton for a hypothetical genocide agaisnt Iran? Didn’t Michael Taussig write a book about a metaphorical cocaine museum? And hey, didn’t Elizabeth Povinelli write a book subtitled “Toward a Theory of Intimacy”—as if to suggest that we don’t currently have a theory of intimacy? As if to suggest that such a theory is—dare I say it—hypothetical for the time being?

I’m just getting started. If Dennis Dalton’s belief in institutional fixity were as firm as the idiotic wording of this petition would suggest it to be, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have gone a week without food and spent his evenings in the freezing cold a year ago. Gil Anidjar’s entire scholarly output is about the total lack of fixity in anything and everything. Anyone who went to his talk on close reading last week knows that action and potentiality are pretty muddled for that guy to begin with. I just Googled Nan Rothschild. Her work doesn’t seem “grounded in the past” at all.

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Probably not. I’m guessing that 95% of the attendees last night had already made up their minds, and that the dearth of public outrage over the cancellation of the second forum reflects a general lack of interest in the issue. Ahmadinejad and the hunger strike have also made “controversy” something of a dirty word around here, and it’s clear that the past year or so hasn’t been good for the typical cast of activists and blowhards.

Or it could be that this round of recrimination doesn’t involve the typical cast of activists and blowhards–that this is a niche issue pitting the school’s gay liberation/radical anti-imperialist wing against its similarly inconsequential bloc of military veterans and supporters. This isn’t an issue that very many people have to think about, and the people who do think about it come from activist constituencies that don’t have much popular cachet–for those reasons I think turnout will be low on Monday and that the forum probably won’t be much of a factor.

I still feel like I have to do some token diligence to the forum itself, so here goes: the con side was a sorry commentary on where left-wing activism is on this campus. ROTC opponents needn’t give us a primer in subaltern studies in order to get their point across–indeed, claiming with much repetition and little recourse to fact that the US military is an iredeemably racist and homophobic institution proves that you are, perhaps, a member of Lucha or SDS. But it also proves a certian lack of interest in anything other than a borderline-hermeneutic concept of what the military is and does, and, by extension, reality itself: “there’s a strong misogynist tradition within the military,” noted military historian and Lucha member Rudy Batzill. Really, I don’t see how religious belief requires any less faith than a social or economic purview that’s not only impervious to facts, but that discounts them by design. Rudy’s military might be racist and misogynist and homophobic. But his military is the only one that exists to him, the real one being an inconvenient interruption to a read on things that is already dogmatically secure.

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As today’s staff editorial points out, Lucha, Students for a Democratic Society, and, nauseatingly enough, that beacon of moderate liberal activism we know as the CU Dems are co-sponsoring an anti-ROTC event tonight. Really, I can’t think of a better way to pay tribute to our veterans than to argue for the exclusion of the military from Columbia’s campus, although I guess Obama’s victory this past week has everyone in a slightly more, umm, audacious mood. It’s really tough to imagine this as a call for dialogue, what with the blatantly provocative nature of hosting an anti-military event on the one day of the year that officially honors men and women in uniform. So to answer this posts’s titular question: these groups don’t really want dialogue.

To wit: The posters for this event show a police officer in riot gear standing on College Walk, assumedly after the crackdown that ended the student uprising in 1968. I’m not really sure what this image has to do with the current debate over ROTC, although it does imply some link between the conservative retrenchment of the late ’60s and the pro-ROTC activity of the present. Such cheap, not to mention lazy, conflations are the enemy of moderate, constructive dialogue: I don’t see Lucha finding much common ground with people whom they’ve already tagged as servants of some fascist, anti-student, and even overtly anti-Columbia status quo. Ominously enough for those of us who believe in the value of center-left activism, Lucha appears to have found common ground with the CU Dems on this one, as the posters list them as a co-sponsor of this event.