Voter turnout was between nine and 10 percent for this election
By LILY FREEMAN — campus@theaggie.org
In the ASUCD fall 2023 election, 21 candidates ran for six seats in the Senate and three constitutional amendments were voted on. Here are the results:
Jonathan Ng was elected to the Senate.
Katia Bouali was elected to the Senate.
Curtis Chen was elected to the Senate.
Yara Kaadan was elected to the Senate.
Jacob Klein was elected to the Senate.
Leah Jung was elected to the Senate.
CA #86, which moves to change the title of members of the Judicial Council to justices, passed with 79.62% of the vote.
CA #87, which formally establishes the Office of the Transfer Student Representative and the Office of the International Student Representative as legislative bodies, removes them from the executive branch and formally defines what it means to be an ASUCD representative, passed with 87.99% of the vote.
CA #88, which moves to change the number of members on the Judicial Council from five to seven, passed with 92.2% of the vote.
While ASUCD can not determine a specific voter turnout percentage due to there being no fee referendums on the ballot, the voter turnout for this fall’s election was between nine and 10%, according to Elections Officer Reid Rizk.
“This is encouraging,” Rizk said. “It’s definitely better than where we were this time last year.” Last fall’s turnout was 5.58%.
Rizk also said that voter retention rates improved with this election.
“We only lost about 250 people from the measure ballot to the Senate ballot, which in previous elections, we’ve lost about one thousand people,” Rizk said. “The fact that people took the time to go [to] the next page and vote is encouraging. It’s all better than where we were last year.”
This fall’s elections had a greater focus on internal improvement, according to Rizk.
“For me, the priority of this election was less about getting out the vote and [more about] building things up,” Rizk said. “I believe that we needed to do a lot of stuff on the inside to make processes work and make sure that we’re cooperating as a whole.”
However, during the spring 2024 elections, Rizk said that ASUCD is aiming to have a much more external focus. This is especially because there is going to be at least one student fee referendum (including The Green Initiative Fund) on the ballot, which requires a 20% voter turnout to be implemented.
“We’re hoping this will allow us to promote more, do more posters and more outreach in general,” Rizk said. “We’ve set aside a lot of money for the spring election, and I’m hoping the next elections officer who comes in uses that in a smart way.”
Written by: Lily Freeman — campus@theaggie.org
