When the Eagle, American University’s student newspaper, realized that the seat reserved on the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission for an AU student was vacant, their editorial board was incensed. And rightly so: AU students have failed to fill the seat for so long that Penny Pagano, the University’s Director of Community and Local Government Outreach, and even some sitting commissioners can’t remember the last time ANC 3D had a student commissioner. However, the Eagle blamed the seat’s vacancy on all the wrong parties.
Like Congress. Chief among the editorial board’s specious assertions was that voting for or becoming a commissioner on ANC 3D—both of which require registering as a voter in the District—wouldn’t be worth any student’s time until D.C.’s Congressional representation had improved.
“AU’s politically active student body would be remiss to trade in their home state voting rights for the stunted and incomplete D.C. ballot,” the board wrote.
Sadly, the intimation that national issues are necessarily more important than local issues only serves to assure AU’s administration that they can continue to be sluggish in facilitating the filling of the ANC seat. And has AU ever been shuffling its feet: despite Pagano’s insistence that everyone in the University’s administration is intent on filling the seat, the University has taken a shockingly long time to change the addresses of the three AU dorms located in this unrepresented district. This prevents a student from running to represent this ANC district, because D.C. Board of Election and Ethics rules stipulate that the address of the candidate must lie within the district they are running to represent, which it currently does not.
Compounding the difficulty of filling the seat is the fact that, to run for the ANC, a student must collect the signatures of 25 of these three dorms’ residents, all of whom must be registered to vote in the District. With barely 1500 students living in the dorms, there may not even be 25 students in this ANC district who are registered as D.C. voters.
To overcome this obstacle, AU students would have to switch teams, forgoing their home state allegiances in order to gain equitable D.C. representation. That’s not fair, and the Eagle’s editorial board is right to be troubled by the democratic tangle that being a politically active student in the District presents. In a perfect world, attending school in D.C. wouldn’t force you to choose between representation in local and national politics, but it does.
While a student who is passionate about national issues or lives in a battleground state may be remiss to sacrifice registration in his or her home state, other students should consider the benefits of ANC representation before they follow the Eagle’s lead and dismiss its politics as little-league. The odd Illinoisian, for example, ought to consider whether Attorney General Lisa Madigan (D) will really need her vote in the coming midterm election, or whether it’s more important to have a voice in things that really impact the campus community, such as fair zoning of new building projects and oversight of the disposal of World War I chemical weapons buried under the University. You heard right—AU has property sitting on caches of mustard gas but can’t get a student seat on the ANC.
Since the struggle for D.C. voting rights is coming to a head, embracing the District’s dismal representative allowance may seem counterintuitive. Then again, if they continue to squander the opportunities for representation that they already have, AU students aren’t convincing anyone of their love of democracy.
Monitor your weapons cache with Molly at mredden@staff.georgetownvoice.com
