Spring Break
Trouble brews in student senate elections
SGA election commissioner avoids dismissal after student senators raise grievances
By: Amanda Tilley
Issue date: 3/25/08 Section: News
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"A few senators weren't happy with the performance of the election commissioner," said off-campus student Sen. Colt Clemens. Senators raised four grievances against Bathman.
A charge of poor managerial effectiveness was a result of the low turnout for candidate registration. "We had 57 students file for Student Senate," Bathman said. Sixty-four seats were available to be filed for.
He said there were several reasons for the low turnout, such as some officer elections being cut from Class Councils and the Residence Hall Association. The only positions elected through SGA are class president and the RHA president and executive vice president.
Bathman said the low turnout might be a reflection of the way some students perceive senators. "People outside Senate weren't really excited to get into Senate possibly because of how they've seen Senate perform over this past year."
"There could be write-in candidates winning with one or two votes," Clemens said.
Student Body President Conner Prochaska said Bathman was doing a lot to secure high voter turnout and that might have been why he missed some things for promoting filing. "We wanted to re-center and refocus him, and I think that's what we did."
Because he allowed some candidates to file outside of the pre-set filing times, Bathman was charged with violating regulations. Bathman said candidates were allowed to file because there had been confusion about the deadline.
"We had set an informal internal procedure that we were going to - because of the possible confusion with the dates - we were going to accept candidate filing up until the mandatory candidates meeting," Bathman said.
Prochaska said there was a mix up between dates SGA set for filings and the dates on the University calendar. SGA set filing to start five weeks before spring break and the University calendar set it for three weeks after winter break. Prochaska said this normally wouldn't be a problem, but spring break is a week earlier than usual for 2008. He said that Bathman consulted with advisers about what to do because of the confusion with the dates.
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