With the goal of making ASB and Class Council officer elections more democratic, Los Altos High School’s Associated Student Body (ASB) has proposed an amendment to its constitution changing the way voting procedures work for school elections.

Under the current system, an advisory panel of adults (including the ASB Advisor, Activities Administrative Assistant, Bookkeeper, and up to two Senior Class Advisors) casts ballots worth 50 votes each, each member of the ASB class casts a ballot worth 33 votes, and the student body had one vote each in electing officers. These weighted votes gave ASB members a hugely outsized influence in elections.

The proposed amendment would replace this with a percentage system for ASB Presidential and Vice Presidential elections. The advisory panels’ combined votes would count for 10 percent of the total vote share, the ASB class’s votes would be worth 25 percent, and the student body’s votes would be worth 65 percent. For all other officer positions, every student’s vote will count equally, and the advisory board will have no vote. The amendment will also require all candidates for ASB Treasurer, Secretary, Activities Commissioner and Junior/Senior Class President to have at least one year of ASB experience.

This proposed amendment is in line with recent ASB changes aiming to make student government more open and accessible. This includes ASB’s most recent Constitutional amendment, which gave the student body the ability to vote on ASB Constitutional amendments rather than having them be decided purely by ASB, as well ranked-choice voting, where voters rank candidates by preference and the candidate with the most overall support wins. 

“Some candidates felt like they were at a disadvantage going in, so ASB realized that its policies weren’t facilitating wider school involvement,” Betancur said. “And by moving from a set number of votes per person to an overall percentage, we could address the event that not many students decide to vote in any given year.”

According to Betancur, the amendment will be voted on by the entire student body, and will most likely be on the same ballot as the vote for ASB and Class Council officers this month.