The Associated Students of Madison hasn’t had the best luck as of late. Thankfully, there’s always an explanation.

Last Tuesday, not only did the organization alert students to a Finance Committee open forum one hour after it started, but it also only had 10 to 12 people show up at a Constitutional Committee listening session on the west end of campus mainly targeting medical students.

Yes, we know there’s an explanation. The e-mail didn’t make it out in time despite being sent in the morning (because mass e-mails are delayed), and there was a conference on the presidential candidates’ health care plans at the same time. While ASM did note its food selection was inferior compared to the health care event, it’s doubtful the addition of Qdoba would have made students think twice.

On Wednesday, the polls closed for the Student Services Finance Committee and Student Council representative elections with voter turnout reaching 5.1 percent.

There are explanations for this, too. Perhaps students followed the advice of Senior Class President Oliver Delgado and are just too focused on the U.S. presidential election. Students don’t see ASM reps as the members of the Justice League as ASM’s ad wizards — who had each candidate associate with a specific superhero — would have hoped. After all, who ever heard of a superhero whose powers included “passing budgets in a single session” or “lobbying the Legislature without actually being registered to do so”?

There are many instances of failure in ASM and some explanations for each incident. But there’s one task that must not fail: passing the new constitution. And they are coming dangerously close to taking all the steam out of that reform.

So far, ASM has had three listening sessions and plans to have another on Wednesday. Then it plans to rewrite the constitution, hold more listening sessions, rewrite the constitution again, and put it to a vote in February. The organization was originally supposed to have this process completed by October but ran out of time and moved for a special election in February.

The reason for this decision, as cited by Constitutional Committee Chair Jeff Wright, was to allow for enough time for student input and revisions.

Perhaps more time was needed — but not four more months. In fact, in an ideal world, we’d like to see this come to a vote at the end of November.

Difficult? Absolutely. But we think it could be done.

Here’s a timeline: Hold your last listening session this week, and hold a special committee the next day or Friday. Take the concerns of the student body, work out a compromise and write your revisions for approval. In the meantime, submit a petition to Student Elections Commission for a special election at the end of November and start negotiations with the Division of Information Technology to get a ballot system up. Hold a special session of Student Council if you have to approve the decision twice. Once the presidential election is over, blitz students with publicity about the new constitution and you should get something above eight percent turnout.

The question that remains is why it’s necessary to finish the document now. First off, winter break is going to kill any momentum ASM builds around the document and force the organization to restart its efforts. Now, maybe it will succeed, but it could also have a low turnout.

But there’s a bigger reason for doing this: legitimacy. One of the reasons people look at ASM and shrug is because there is no sign that the efforts of our student representatives go the distance they need to. There are always explanations, excuses and reasons why our student government fails us. But if they failed us in this regard, no one could argue they didn’t give it a near monumental effort.