Two undergraduate student government candidates who missed a mandatory orientation event will still be allowed to run in the upcoming election, the Election Board decided Tuesday.
J. Cesar Flores and Aditi Agrawal missed the mandatory Undergraduate Students Association Council candidate orientation Friday, which is an automatic disqualification unless the absence is excused for a medical emergency or an academic, religious or other conflict.
Flores is running as an independent candidate for the transfer student representative position. Agrawal is a Bruins United candidate for general representative.
Agrawal missed orientation because she was participating in a dance competition, said Election Board Chair Shagun Kabra. She would have attended the orientation that was originally scheduled for Thursday, but she had already booked plane tickets for her competition when the date of the orientation changed, Kabra added.
Flores was absent because of a misunderstanding of election protocol, Kabra said. He thought the Election Board would notify him if he was eligible to run before candidate orientation, but that was not part of the process. The Election Board decided to excuse his absence from the meeting because he cooperated with them and seemed to understand his mistake, Kabra said.
Another independent candidate, Jack Guo, dropped out of the election before the orientation. He would have challenged Amy Shao, a LET’S ACT! candidate, in the race for Cultural Affairs commissioner.
There are 25 candidates running for positions on USAC. Five of the 14 council seats are unopposed.
Voting will be from April 27 to May 1.
Compiled by Katie Shepherd, Bruin senior staff.
Misunderstanding of election protocol? I’m sorry but that’s a weak excuse for Flores. I don’t want potential council members who can’t take the initiative to make sure that they are 100% sure about what the entire process entails. If it’s important to you, you make sure you know what you need to do. If Flores can’t understand how the election process works (when everyone else running understood, mind you) then how can Flores be trusted to understand how to effectively run an office and function within all the other bylaws and regulations and bureaucracy that exists in USAC? This doesn’t exactly instill confidence…
Please take into consideration that Flores, is running as an independent. Flores has also represented the interest of 2.2 million community college students with thirty other Council members in the Student Senate for California Community Colleges. If you divide that by 30 bodies that’s roughly 70,000 students almost double the size of the entire population at UCLA. Flores has also prevented the corruption of having a Sole Proprietor in the SSCCC by preventing its incorporation a year ago in General Assembly for CC. At the time Flores was in office, he made sure the funding to the SSCCC from community colleges would be in the hands of the current Council and recommended that incorporation of the SSCCC be approved by the Secretary of State not through the attorney the SSCCC hired prior Flores’ almost unanimous vote. Flores could have saved the SSCCC 8k if he had been appointed prior. Hope this instills confidence.