The University of Massachusetts Student Government Association passed an election reform in early November that will move senate elections from the fall to spring semester to give student voters more time to learn about the candidates.
Under the election reforms, proposed by SGA president Sïonan Barrett, candidates will be elected based on their year of expected graduation rather than the residential area where they reside.
Former Chancellor of Elections Divya Kirti found the short period of campaigning leading up to fall elections was “unethical and not effective.”
She explained that the elections are supposed to embody having a say in what happens in the SGA, and the previous election format gave students no time to learn about the candidates and sent the message that their voices were not as important as the SGA’s schedule.
Barrett agreed that the change to elections is beneficial to students.
“Having a longer senate term [promotes] more consistency and action throughout the summer and beginning of the year from the voting body,” Barrett said.
The biggest change to the elections, however, is the change of the breakdown of candidates. Instead of each candidate being elected by the residential area they live in, candidates are now elected by their expected graduation year that is listed on Spire. So for example in the spring, freshmen run for sophomore positions, sophomores run for junior positions and juniors run for senior positions. Anyone running with more than four years of college experience would run for senior positions.
Barrett believes this change will allow senators to be “more representative and serve a broader mission.” Kirti also expresses that this change is positive because the election is “less about where you live and more about what really brings [students] together,” which is bonding over running for elections and also possibly bonding over the same experiences being in the same graduation year.
Barrett explained that the election reforms were also made to increase voter turnout by having the president, vice president, trustee and senate elections at the same time. The reforms also encourage candidates to run for the speaker and associate speaker positions if they fail to win the position they originally campaigned for.
Both Barrett and Kirti said that change is always positive and that the new format seems promising.
Barrett said that these rules will make the SGA “stronger and prepared.”
“No system is going to be perfect, and every system has flaws,” Kirti said. She also stated that if the SGA wants to be a positive message for change, it has to feel comfortable stepping outside of their comfort zone and try new things to encourage students to grow.
Some students also believe that these changes will be positive to campus. Sophomore Residential Assistant Colleen Morin believed that the election reforms will have a positive impact on campus.
“It goes back to the idea of separating elections by grade in high school,” Morin said.
Since it seemed to work in high schools, she believed that this could work here, too.
However, some students believed that an individual’s residential area is a very important aspect in a student’s life and should be considered in elections.
Junior RA Brian McCarthy was skeptical of the election reforms.
“I feel it’s much easier to relate to someone who lives in the same area as you than someone who’s one of the thousands in your class,” McCarthy said. “I don’t think this is the way to approach more participation. I think greater and improved advertisement is where SGA needs to look.”
Northeast Area Government Treasurer and sophomore electrical engineering major Reno Sarge shared a similar opinion.
“Elections by year could cause a dramatic disparity between representations by area, which would be a more serious problem due to the fact that residential area representation is more important than diverse age representation.”
Kristen Leonard can be reached at [email protected].
