On April 10, Undergraduate Council of Students President Talib Reddick ’26 and Undergraduate Finance Board Chair Naomi LeDell ’26 stood on the steps of the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center to announce that Ariel Shifrin ’27 was elected as UCS president and Aidan Lu ’27 as UFB chair. Back in 2025, both Reddick and LeDell ran unopposed in an election that saw a 16% turnout — the lowest since at least 2022. On the steps of Faunce, they announced their successors, Shifrin and Lu, who also ran unopposed, in an election that saw a similarly abysmal 18% turnout.
In October 2024, I wrote that “Brown is not a democracy.” I criticized the irony of UCS’s call for “democratic representation” on the Brown Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — when only 21% of Brown’s student body voted in the election that brought those students into their positions of power. But when I wrote that Brown is not a democracy, I did not mean that Brown should not have a democracy at all. With voter turnout decreasing year after year, perhaps it’s time to let student government fail.
To increase voter turnout, Brown’s student government needs a quorum requirement. I suggest that for the student government to be seated or for a referendum to pass, 33% of students should have to vote for at least one position or question. If the election does not meet this required quorum, the election should not be considered binding, and, similar to a parliamentary system, there should be successive runoff elections, one after another, until a quorum is finally reached.
Low voter turnout has plagued the Student Government Association throughout my entire time here at Brown. My first year, the SGA general election had a modest 29% turnout, my sophomore year 21%, my junior year just 16% and this year 18%. Turnout for recent referendums has not fared better, and the council has yet to publicize the results of last month’s referendum on its proposed constitutional reforms.
The editorial page board, on which I am a member, has taken notice. The board wrote in April 2025 and April 2026 that low turnout represents “a student government built on the apathy of the student body rather than participation,” which in turn “weakens our ability to respond credibly and confidently to the issues that affect us all.” These sentiments continue to ring true today. Student government at Brown is given real power over student life — allocating millions of dollars in student activities funding, advocating for students and planning campus-wide social events — without real accountability to the students they serve or a mandate to represent them. This status quo should not continue.
This is not normal. Many of our Ivy League peers have a much healthier student democracy than we do. This year, the Yale College Council saw a 36% voter turnout. The Harvard Undergraduate Association had a 35% turnout. In December 2025, a writer for the Daily Princetonian lamented about “what this year’s dismal turnout says about civic life at Princeton.” The dismal turnout in question was 34% — a decade low for Princeton but a rate much higher than Brown’s turnout during my entire time here on College Hill. And at Dartmouth, student government elections have in recent years seen turnout around 40%.
Although a quorum and the resulting lack of student governance might seem like a drastic measure, making such a change could very quickly reinvigorate participation in student elections. On the part of the SGA, it would light a fire under our student government to avoid complacency and prove its relevance to students, lest it lose its power. As for students, it would force them to reckon with the reality of having no student government — no club funding, no formals and no campus voice.
A simple quorum can help reinvigorate democracy at Brown by forcing student government to matter. The student government should represent students. If it cannot prove that it is worth enough for students to even fill out one Qualtrics poll, as consistently shown by low voter turnout, then it should not exist. It’s time to stop pretending that Brown has a democracy and actually make it so.
Tasawwar Rahman ’26 can be reached at tasawwar_rahman@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
Tas Rahman is an Opinion Editor and a member of the Editorial Page Board. He hails from Detroit, Michigan and is concentrating in Computational Biology and Judaic Studies. In his free time, you can find Tas hiking and reading the Atlantic (alongside the Herald).
