Bar Will Be Raised for Overseer Petition Candidates After Controversial Ticket

Harvard’s Board of Overseers—the University’s second-highest governing body—will change the way it elects its members in the coming years, replacing traditional paper ballots with an online voting system and requiring more signatures for petition candidates.

Historically, University alumni have elected Overseers—who serve six-year terms and advise the University president—through paper ballots that Harvard sent them in the mail.

The new voting process will allow Harvard’s many alumni to vote for the body—as well as for members of the Harvard Alumni Association board of directors—on a secure online system, which will likely launch by the 2018-19 school year, the University announced Thursday. Turnout for the Overseers election is traditionally low: 35,870 ballots were cast in last year’s election, a fraction of the estimated 265,000 Harvard degree holders eligible to vote.

“We’re pleased to move to online voting, which alumni around the world have asked us to adopt,” Kenji Yoshino ’91, the president of the Board of Overseers, wrote in a statement. “We will make this change as soon as we can put a secure and reliable system in place.”

Harvard will also increase more than tenfold the number of signatures required to qualify as a petition candidate, going from 201 signatures to one percent of the eligible voting population, or around 2,650 signatures. However, aspiring petition candidates will be able to gather those signatures by generating a petition online instead of obtaining official watermarked forms from the University.

Harvard will also mandate that Overseers hold degrees from the University; previously, anyone could run for the board.

The changes come after one particularly controversial set of petition candidates. Earlier this year, an outsider slate of five alumni took a controversial and ultimately unsuccessful shot at the Board of Overseers via petition, drawing national headlines by pushing a two-pronged platform: to eliminate undergraduate tuition and scrutinize affirmative action as antithetical to diversity.

Ron K. Unz ’83, the conservative intellectual who mounted the “Free Harvard, Fair Harvard” slate of petition candidates, said he was not surprised that Harvard made the changes to the Overseers election process.

“From the beginning I expected this effort to be a one-off effort that would either succeed or fail, and if it failed that Harvard would take steps to ensure something like this did not happen again in the future,” Unz said. University President Drew G. Faust repeatedly denounced both the free tuition and admissions proposals.

“The past year’s election process brought various election issues into sharper focus, including what many people regarded as a surprisingly low number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot by petition, and what some have regarded as unduly cumbersome methods for supporting petition candidates or casting votes,” Harvard spokesperson David J. Cameron wrote in an email.

Unz acknowledged that many of the changes to the voting system made “perfect sense.”

“It’s not surprising that given the number of overseas Harvard alumni that they would switch to an electronic system,” Unz said. But for petition candidates like Unz, these changes might come at a cost.

“Given the combinations of these two changes it’s clear that our campaign was the last possible campaign along the lines of what we organized,” Unz said.

—Staff writer Andrew M. Duehren can be reached at andy.duehren@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @aduehren.

—Staff writer Daphne C. Thompson can be reached at daphne.thompson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @daphnectho.