The graduate student government voted Wednesday to include a voluntary campaign spending limit of $250 per candidate in its elections code.
Members of the Graduate Students Association considered multiple elections code changes at their forum Wednesday night, including a proposal to decrease the number of graduate student signatures needed to run for office from 50 to 25 and a motion to create voluntary spending caps for candidates. Cindy Stanphill, the GSA elections commissioner, proposed the changes at the meeting Wednesday.
For each of the proposals, forum members cast their votes after just five to 10 minutes of discussion.
To run for office in the spring GSA elections, candidates must collect at least 50 signatures from fellow graduate students.
At the meeting, GSA members debated whether the threshold of 50 signatures is too high for some graduate students, especially for those who come from smaller campus departments and may not have the same networking abilities as students from larger departments.
Stanphill said that some graduate students have said the number of required signatures was too high and prohibited them from running.
“Personally, I don’t think 50 (signatures) is that much, especially if someone is looking to represent the whole graduate students population (at UCLA),” said Linzi Juliano, a GSA representative from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture at the meeting.
Following the brief discussion, members struck down the election code change with a 6-10-0 vote.
Cody Trojan, the outgoing GSA vice president of academic affairs, said he hopes that keeping the required 50 signatures will make the graduate student government elections more competitive than lowering the amount.
Next, forum members discussed giving candidates the option to adhere to a voluntary spending limit during their campaigns.
Initially, the proposal suggested that candidates should stick to a limit of $1,000, but the cap was decreased to $250 after some members expressed concerns that candidates with unstable finances would be at a disadvantage if the cap was too high.
“We should lower the amount to around $200 or $250 to even out the playing field for graduate students who can’t spend large amounts on campaigns,” said Hope McCoy, the 2014-2015 GSA vice president of internal affairs.
The forum members approved the change with an 8-7-0 vote.
Graduate students generally spend up to $100 on their campaigns, said Mike Cohn, the department head of the Student Organizations, Leadership & Engagement office, formerly called the Center for Student Programming. Cohn said it would be illegal for GSA to force candidates to adhere to a spending cap in the elections.
The Undergraduate Students Association Council also has a set voluntary spending limit, but candidates typically spend hundreds of dollars more than the spending cap, and only several candidates agree to adhere to the cap each year. Most candidates who stick to the voluntary spending limit run as uncontested independents during USAC elections.
The next GSA election is in spring 2015. Before that, a new elections commissioner and forum will have the ability to make further changes to the elections codes.