The Senate approved changes to the elections process after debating whether a candidate should need 51 percent of the vote to win or just a majority, which is anything greater than 50 percent. If no candidate receives 51 percent of the vote, a runoff election between the top two candidates occurs.
Despite disagreeing with that rule, freshman class Sen. Daiyaan Colbert said he would vote for the changes because the other edits were necessary.
“It is fundamentally broken,” Colbert said, “but at the same time if we don’t ratify this, it will still be way fundamentally broken.”
Sen. Dustin Volz, of Barrett, the Honors College, objected to requiring a candidate to receive 51 percent of the vote to win, saying it was an arbitrary number and that elections typically require no more than a majority.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Volz said. “Every other election, on a federal level, state level (or) local level, goes to the majority. Why would ours be any different?”
Director of Parliamentary Procedure Jose Rios led the election procedure changes, meeting with judiciary and executive boards multiple times and e-mailing senators about various changes.
Rios said if senators had wanted more changes to the elections process, they should have voiced their opinions at meetings or in e-mails. He said Volz was the only person to voice concern over the definition of majority prior to the senate meeting. He also worried the senate would delay the changes and not accomplish anything.
“If we keep pushing this over and over and over again, we’re going to be stuck with the same problems next semester,” Rios said.
The Senate also discussed the ASASUD’s funding requests process when Volz told the other senators he had been contacted by a student representing an organization that had not received the funding they had been granted in October.
Volz said he did not know exactly where a problem had occurred but that ASASUD had not communicated with the student well. He added that one of the students from the organization had recently lost her job and had to borrow money from her parents because she had not yet been reimbursed.
“Clearly something is falling by the wayside,” Volz said. “I do know that I never heard these problems occurring last year.”
President Christian Vasquez said that because the students had never received funding before, they had to be entered into the system before receiving their checks, which caused an unexpected delay. He added that the students opted to have the checks mailed to them from ASASUD instead of picking them up in person, which also delayed the process.
The student had repeatedly been told that the checks were in the mail already, Volz said.
“At the very least there’s a breakdown in communication,” he said.
Volz said this was not the first time he was contacted by student organizations frustrated about their funding requests.
ASASUD also gave a total of $2,482.09 to five student organizations: $250 to Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlan (M.E.Ch.A.) to attend a conference in Oregon; $450 to DPC Aware to host World AIDS Day at the Downtown campus; $412.09 to ASU’s chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists for club t-shirts; $1,000 to the American Jewish Press Association (AJPA) for catering, t-shirts and miscellaneous costs; and $370 to the Walter Cronkite School’s new photography club to join the National Press Photographers Association. An additional $300 request by AJPA for promotional funding was tabled due to a lack of specifics in the budget.
Contact the reporter at john.l.fitzpatrick@asu.edu
