Imagine a government that lets you vote, announces a winner, but won’t tell you how the vote totals came out.

Imagine a government that holds an election, then cancels the results under a cloud of fraud, allows all the original candidates to run again, but won’t tell the betrayed voters who benefited from the illicitly cast ballots.

Now stop imagining, and look around, because the above describes the Student Senate here at SMU. Last week’s first-year class vote thrust the SMU election process into the harsh light of public scrutiny, and what was seen was not pretty.

Roughly 15 percent of votes cast in the original first-year class election were fraudulent, a scandal that led the Senate to veto all the results. But instead of informing the voters as to who had benefited from the faked votes, the Senate stonewalled requests for such information.

This is a disservice to the first-year voters, who deserve to know which candidates the illegal votes aided, particularly if anyone won their race through the support of the illegal votes. The people wronged in this horrible incident were the voters. They were the ones who had their voice silenced because of the misdeeds of others, and then by the Senate who refused to fully inform the voters of the details of the situation.

The argument could be made that releasing vote totals in a scandalous case like this could have stigmatized candidates who benefited from the illicit votes. However, running for a public office involves the acceptance of exposure to a certain degree of chance that you could be embarrassed or maligned, perhaps even to the point of defeat – even for something for which you may not have been guilty.

Those who vote at SMU, be it just for the first-year class, or for the student body as a whole, deserve to know that their votes will be counted properly and fairly.

The only way to ensure this is through a full disclosure of all vote totals. The results for every student body election should be fully reported by the Senate. Vote totals should be made available not only to The Daily Campus, but also on the Web, where any student can see precisely how the elections turned out.

If voters respect the Senate enough to vote in their elections, then the Senate must return that respect by informing them of how many votes the various candidates received.

If the Senate doesn’t trust the voters enough to release the full details of every election, why should the student body trust the Senate at all?