The senate proposal petition is expected to fail to reach the
required number of signatures to put it on a special election
ballot for a second straight year.
In order for a special election to be held, 3,722 signatures
““ or 15 percent of the undergraduate student population
““ needed to be collected and validated.
Changes to the Undergraduate Students Association Council
constitution, such as the senate proposal, require a two-thirds
majority of voting students for passage.
The new structure would have changed the current 13-member
council to include a body of 20 voting legislative senators, five
voting executives and five non-voting commissioners.
The Election Board has not finished verifying signatures on the
petition. However, the board has predicted that the petition will
be short of its 15 percent requirement by roughly 200 signatures,
based on the average number of invalid signatures found thus far in
the verification, Election Board chairwoman Anat Herzog said.
Signatures are being disqualified for being illegibly written,
or if the accompanying student ID numbers are invalid.
This year’s attempt to pass the senate proposal via a
special election is a repeat of last year’s attempt to adopt
the senate format.
Both times senate petitions were disqualified due to invalid
signatures, and the senate proposal never made it onto an election
ballot.
Brian Neesby, former General Representative and author of the
senate proposal, has been heading the senate campaign since last
year and said this year’s petition disqualification was
unpredictable and very disappointing.
Newly elected councilmembers from the Bruins United slate
““ of which Neesby was a part this year ““ said they will
continue to work on the senate proposal in the coming year, though
no single person has taken over leadership of the campaign after
Neesby graduates this year.
Neesby and other councilmembers said they collected more than
900 extra signatures to ensure the petition would reach the
required number of validated signatures this year, and he said that
the number of collected signatures reflects that students are in
favor of the senate proposal.
“It’s sad that the senate proposal is still not on
the ballot. … The students want to vote, but procedurally it
hasn’t gone through,” Neesby said,
Newly elected USAC President Marwa Kaisey, who spent the past
year helping to collect signatures for the senate petition, said
although the petition was disqualified she is happy to see the
widespread support for a structural change to USAC.
“We’ve had over a year to educate people about the
senate. Students understand the ideology behind the proposal and
that changes need to be made to make USAC more
representative,” Kaisey said.
However, former USAC President Jenny Wood said the petition
falling short of signatures a second time shows students do not
support adopting a senate structure, and the council should instead
focus on student needs.
“It’s a waste of student government efforts to work
on something that students clearly do not want,” she
said.