Last spring student voters went to the polls and elected none other than Rammy “Rambo” Salem ’10 to the S.A. presidency. Those with a sense of history will recall that the film character Rambo, artfully played by Sylvester Stallone, rampaged through the Pacific Northwest, his brain short-circuited by the horrors of Vietnam and a manipulating colonel. Our own Rambo is no lunatic on the loose, but since assuming the top spot in student government, his behavior has been no less combative than his film doppelganger. This much, at least, is clear from the early meetings of the S.A..

On Tuesday, April 14, students will have the opportunity to do something very few of their peers at other colleges and universities are able to do — vote for a Trustee who is an undergraduate student. Notice that I didn’t say a “Student Trustee” because the person you elect will be a full voting member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees with the same voice among 64 equals. Next year, you will elect a graduate student.

Cornell is unique among its peers because it has trustees with full rights chosen by and representing specific constituencies — undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, employees, alumni and representatives of New York State. This is not a new experiment. It has been so for some 40 years.

NEW YORK (AP) — A newspaper report Thursday said tens of thousands of eligible voters have been removed from rolls or blocked from registering in at least six swing states. Election officials lined up to defend their registration procedures and said they had done nothing wrong.

The New York Times based its findings on reviews of state records and Social Security data, and said it had identified apparent problems in Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina.

Two states had purged voters, the Times said. Ohio and three other states were cited only for sending several requests for voter registration verifications to the Social Security Administration.

54 Cornell students packed into 12 cars made the three-hour drive this weekend to Pennsylvania — a crucial battleground state with a narrow democratic victory in the 2004 presidential election. The group, organized by the Cornell Democrats, traveled to the town of Stroudsburg to volunteer for Barack Obama’s campaign in Monroe County.

Students were put to work immediately upon their arrival Friday evening making phone calls to undecided voters.

The campaign’s goal for Saturday was to knock on 1,000 doors and make as many calls as possible. But Cornell students exceeded local campaign organizers’ expectations, according to John Spears, one of three campaign leaders in Stroudsburg.

Since the United States democracy operates in such a way that every citizen of 18 years and older has the right to cast a vote, one would imagine that every citizen’s vote would have the right be counted. According to Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections for Leon County, Fla., however, this is not at all true.

This past Saturday, New Yorkers for Verified Voting invited Sancho to speak to the public concerning issues of the flawed voting processes that occur in the country.