Proponents of the senate proposal said Monday that they have
submitted more than enough signatures to the Election Board to hold
a special election during ninth week, though the board has not yet
verified all the signatures.
The proposal’s supporters had until Monday at 5 p.m. to
submit the 3,722 required signatures, which represent 15 percent of
the undergraduate student body. Monday was the final deadline to
submit signatures for any special elections to be held this
academic year.
The senate proposal, which was voted down by the Undergraduate
Students Association Council earlier this year, would reorganize
the undergraduate student government from its current 13-member
council system to include 20 voting senators, along with nonvoting
executives and commissioners.
The E-Board has eight days to verify the signatures, according
to the Undergraduate Students Association constitution. If the
required number of signatures can be verified, the special election
must be held within 15 days.
E-Board Vice Chairwoman Allie Weinstein said the board will not
confirm how many signatures were submitted until it has completed
the verification process.
“It’s not just counting,” she said. “We
have to check the signatures, check for duplicates. There are a lot
of things that have to happen before we’ll know whether the
election is going to happen.”
General Representative Brian Neesby, who authored the proposal,
said he expected to have between 800 and 900 extra signatures.
Neesby attempted a similar signature campaign last year but
failed to meet the 15 percent threshold because several hundred
signatures could not be verified because they were illegible or did
not match students’ legal names.
He said he hopes the 800 signature buffer will prevent the same
thing from happening this year, and added that he thinks the
signature verification process will be more fair this year.
Neesby has repeatedly said that he thinks many signatures were
unfairly disqualified last year.
He said students who signed their nicknames rather than their
legal names were disqualified, and illegible signatures were
immediately thrown out.
This year, the E-Board has agreed to take steps to check the
illegible signatures to see if they match registered
students’ names, something they did not do last year, Neesby
said. The E-Board will check signatures against student
identification numbers to see if the signatures sufficiently
resemble a student’s name.
Financial Supports Commissioner Ryan Smeets, who has been
helping collect signatures, said supporters of the proposal have
learned from the outcome of last year’s signature
campaign.
“We’ve had better relations with E-Board this
year,” he said.
“There have been better lines of communication. It’s
been more of an ongoing process.”