So the very first year we created a special election focusing on the fee referenda and the administration like literally refused to participate, would not give me any information at all.
All I had was the public records that were given to the board of trustees.
So I created ballot wording that was as balanced as I could saying what the fee was about, what it was supposed to go to, and in the ballot provided a direct link to the board of trustee document.
We said, hey, we're going to have this election. Let's do it. We talked with Technician, Technician was publicizing it, and we had it and it turned out fairly well.
Turnout wasn't that great because it had never been done before. I think we had just over a thousand students vote.
But if you were to look at the breakdown of who voted it was like twenty percent freshmen, twenty percent sophomores, twenty percent juniors, twenty percent seniors, twenty percent graduate students. You couldn't get a more even distribution,
and in terms of distribution by college there were votes from every single college roughly in proportion to their overall enrollment. It was like a statistician's dream as far as exit poll results, you know, it was perfect.
So as we did it the second time through I told them at the beginning of the year we're going to have these referendums,
and I also wanted to have the committee's deliberations videotaped
so we can put videos online and instead of linking to the board of trustee documents link to the videos and let students do it that way.
I worked with Dr. Stafford and we came up with a compromise for that so the videos were put online. I mean no one watched them but like thirty-something people
but at least it was there. Students had, for the first time ever in NC State's history, all of the exact same information as all the fee advisory people.
They knew in advance the referendum was coming, the different campus units wanted to make sure their supporters turned out to vote for it, and you had more than triple the turnout. I think we had like three thousand one hundred and eighty-ish turnout in the second election, more than triple.
So by that point I'm like, okay, this is entrenched, this is on its way, this is cool,
and that was kind of where we went with it, and I think the year after I graduated they did it again. I think the Rally for Talley referendum had like eight thousand-something people, just huge numbers of folks,
that we never had had the ability to do that before, and it was done out of desperation because I recognized the senate was losing its ability to influence the fee debate.
By putting that in place you now had fee committee deliberations, a student vote, then a senate vote based on the student vote and then the fee advisory committee had a final vote where they now had student feedback, senate feedback, everything else. It completely altered the landscape of the process.