College Council Elections Begin, Campus-wide Elections Postponed to Week 8

Associated Students of UC San Diego (ASUCSD) spring elections have been delayed to May 18, six weeks after the original scheduled date of April 6, in response to campus measures focused on mitigating the spread of COVID-19.

Originally, ASUCSD elections were set to be held during Week 2 of Spring Quarter 2020 as prescribed in the ASUCSD constitution. In response to the current situation, ASUCSD Senate passed a constitutional amendment granting the elections manager and ASUCSD executives the power to form an emergency committee that can make temporary changes to the elections code during a campus emergency. The amendment does not specify what a campus emergency is.

On March 13, the committee unanimously decided to postpone campus-wide ASUCSD elections until Week 8, while college council elections will continue to be held this week. These measures only apply to the 2020 election season.

The CAPS Student Fee Referendum will remain on the ballot for the Week 8 election, and the Recreation Student Fee Referendum has been postponed until next year.

“This was a decision made unanimously by the committee; after a long conversation about the status of the school we had decided that at that point there was no clear message or plan on how the status of the school would be come Week 2,” explained Elections Manager Danielle Viviani. “We all agreed that it would be splitting [ASUCSD’s] focus from our advocacy efforts and managing the crisis to spend our effort informing and encouraging the entirety of our student body to vote.”

This year, 22 candidates are running for 14 positions in ASUCSD. Candidates typically organize into slates, political parties that are created for elections and usually dissolve at the end of the election. Two slates filed to run this year: Forward! and BOLD. However, only BOLD has candidates running for every position. Meanwhile, Forward! registered candidates for two of the three executive positions and two senator positions.

Forward!, formerly known as The Front, attempted to publicly recruit candidates from the general student body. Slate cofounders Patrick Miencharoen, a third-year Political Science student from Revelle College, and Samuel Fleet, a second-year Cognitive Science student from Muir College, held a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) on the UCSD subreddit in an effort to recruit students.

“We chose to recruit [publicly] because that’s the way it ought to be in a democracy, you do things upfront and in the public eye,” Miencharoen said. “Parties/slates go out and pitch their ideas to people and people join the party/slate with whom they’re most ideologically aligned with. We here at Forward! are committed to promoting a liberal, open, and active democracy.”

Forward! consists of four candidates headed by Miencharoen. He is running for president alongside Fleet, who is running for vice president (VP) of campus affairs. They are the only two running for executive positions. The remaining two members, James Callahan and Phoenix Stout, are running for two of the five campus-wide senator positions available.

BOLD consists of 13 candidates, led by Campus-Wide Senator Kimberly Giangtran. Giangtran is running for president, Advocate General Hannah Kreitman for VP campus affairs, and Alisha Saxena for VP external affairs. Four members are running for the campus-wide senator positions. BOLD candidates are also running unopposed for arts and humanities senator, physical sciences senator, social sciences senator, and both off-campus senator positions.

Five independent candidates are running in the election this year. An Huang, the current arts and humanities senator, is running against Saxena for VP external affairs. Three independents are running for the campus-wide senator positions. Finally, independent candidate Sean Dearden will be running against BOLD candidate Mihir Pandya for biological sciences senator.

Since campaigning does not begin until May 10 at 4:00 p.m., information regarding candidate and slate platforms are on the online candidates list and slates list, respectively.

Students will cast their votes on TritonLink. College council voting started at 10:00 a.m. today and will end at 4:00 p.m. on April 10. Election results will be available at 6:30 p.m. on April 10.

ASUCSD voting will be from 10:00 a.m. on May 18 to 4:00 p.m. on May 22. Election results will be available at 6:30 p.m. on May 22.Samir Nomani is the News Editor at The Triton. You can follow him @samir_the_first.

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