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Associated Students of Madison started to hear what students think about their newly proposed constitution Wednesday.

The first two listening sessions were open to students, created with the hope of giving ASM members some student feedback and ideas about the constitution.

“These listening sessions are to give you an opportunity to shape the future of your student government,” ASM member Johnny Tackett said.

According to Constitutional Committee Chair Jeff Wright, the feedback sessions will give ASM members a chance to make revisions to the constitution based on student ideas and concerns.

Wright said ASM has had several problems in the past, including the inability to communicate with students efficiently and low student participation and voter turnout. He said he believes the new constitution will address these issues.

“Because we know what people are charged with doing, we think we’ll better be able to hold people accountable,” Wright said. “Voter turnout could increase if there’s a better definition of what people are voting for.”

Wright explained the new constitution would create executive, legislative and judicial branches for ASM, headed by a student body president. He said this would make clearer responsibilities within the organization.

The legislative branch would consist of a Student Senate with representatives from every school or college within the University of Wisconsin, which is similar to ASM’s current Student Council setup.

Wright said the judicial branch would be essentially the same, except there would be nine justices instead of eight, and they would be appointed by the president.

“The justices would be able to set precedents, which will make them accountable to the decisions they made in the past,” Wright said.

Kevin Ott, Student Council Legislative Affairs chair, expressed several doubts about whether the new constitution would bring about changes.

He said he sees the potential for the same problems ASM experiences currently, especially with the Student Senate being so similar to Student Council.

“I still see we’re going to have 33 people sitting around in a room and saying, ‘Let’s forward it to the judicial people, let’s let these people handle it,’ instead of being proactive and handling things on their own,” Ott said.

UW junior Sean McMaster said he decided to attend the listening session based on his past negative experiences with the Student Services Finance Committee. He said he hopes ASM members will take his concerns about the constitution into consideration.

Wright said he thought the turnout for the first session was “good,” considering the meeting was basically an in-depth policy discussion.

“It’s hard to get students excited about an event that’s nontraditional,” Wright said. “Hopefully, the more they hear about this, we’ll get more students who are interested and attend.”

The second draft of the new ASM constitution is set for completion in November, and the final draft is scheduled for December. If passed, the constitution would be adopted in February 2009.