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Elections to solve many issues
SCSU Student Government will hold its elections Wednesday and Thursday.
On the ballot will be nominees for president and vice president, 15 senatorial positions and a referendum to ratify the newly drafted student constitution.
Voting will be held from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days. Ballot boxes will be set up in Atwood Memorial Center, ECC and Stewart Hall.
The nominees for president and vice president respectively are: Dan Johnson and Brad Carlson; Dan Martinez and Gordie Loewen; and Brett Sween and Desiree Westby.
To qualify to run for president, a candidate must be a student at SCSU, garner 115 signatures in support of their nomination, and maintain a 2.0 GPA.
Twenty-one candidates will be running for 15 senatorial positions. To qualify for a senate position, a candidate must also be an SCSU student with a 2.0 GPA, but only 75 signatures are needed.
"Senators are the voice of the students," said Danielle Grabowski, Student Government vice president, and chair of the Election Committee. "They represent the students on issues such as tuition and funding, and sit on the various university and Student Government committees."
The committees include Student Services, Fee Allocation, Campus Affairs, Legislative Affairs, Cultural Diversity, Constitutional Review Committee, Urban Affairs, Academic Affairs, and Public Relations.
Candidates for the Senate are Amanda Rae Seelen, Tom Croke, Socrates Sekou Barry, Dean Goebel, Jeffrey Williams, Phiengtavanh Savatdy, Cory Lawrence, Hasan Varoglu, James Maddox, Derek Burmeister, Rachel Hughes, Jennifer Pape, Scott Bushee, Kayla Nelson, Katie Northrup, Kash Ahua, Lanka Dasanayaka, Yee Ling Mui, Grace Lindsey Eull, Paul Ben-Yehuda and Beth Lococo.
Four of the candidates are incumbents, and 12 are members of the newly formed Greek Party, which had nominated Johnson as its presidential candidate.
Also on the ballot this week will be a referendum to approve the changes to the student constitution. At least 8 percent of the student body need to vote for the constitution to be ratified.
The changes in the student constitution have caused a minor uproar within the student media, as the deletion of a passage, which stated that student managers and editors of student media could not be removed or suspended for arbitrary reasons, touched off a good deal of debate.
Yorgun Marcel, chair of the Constitutional Review Committee, has stated that the passage was removed to erase any confusion that the Student Government could control student media, which he said it cannot, and also because it was repetitive with MnSCU's constitution.
The change was one of the issues the presidential candidates debated last Thursday, with Martinez supporting the changes, Sween supporting them to the extent that they did not cause any confusion, and Johnson saying that the changes were unnecessary.
All the candidates agreed that the other changes in the constitution were acceptable. Marcel termed these changes as cosmetic, applying almost exclusively to Student Government and its internal functions.
If the constitution is passed by the students, it will go to SCSU President Roy Saigo for final ratification.
Jake Zisla can be reached at: [email protected]
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