Of the five parties competing for the student body presidency, only two filed a large number of candidates for General Assembly and Student Senate.
The Impact and Elevation parties submitted 104 candidates between them for the Associated Students of the University of Utah Student Senate and General Assembly. Matthew Menlove will run for Senior Class President from Elevation, and Jessica Judkins will run from Impact.
Apathy, Probable Cause and What? do not have anyone running with them for senior class president. Apathy is running with two students, and Probable Cause has one.
Impact has 63 candidates, one for each of the positions in the Senate and Assembly. Elevation has 41.
“Based on my experience, having good candidates as well as many candidates is very important to the success of the campaign,” said Ben Lowe, ASUU president. “They are the most dedicated workers.”
According to Lowe, his party had almost as many candidates as there are Assembly and Senate seats when he successfully ran for office last year.
Kristien Hixson, who is running for Student Senate with Impact, was responsible to find enough candidates for her party from each of the U’s 16 colleges. She did this by going through her personal contacts to find people she felt were qualified.
She also had each of the candidates meet with Bill Edwards and Randall Lloyd, who are running for president and vice president from Impact, before filing.
“Your candidates are your support,” she said, explaining why she was working so hard to find people to run from her party. “You feel like you’re part of a campaign community.”
Hixson also said choosing candidates to support a party also allows the party to select people it would most like to work with in the upcoming year.
Dave McGowan, who is running with Impact from the College of Science, never considered running until a friend from high school called him and asked him to run.
“I didn’t really know anything about it,” McGowan said. “I just came up here and talked about it.”
Although Elevation did not find candidates for all of the positions, the party wished to focus on finding “quality” candidates, according to AnnMarie Allen, student body presidential candidate.
“We’re looking at filling seats with individuals informed about what they were getting themselves into,” said Colter Hammer, who is running for vice president with Allen. “We’re very pleased with the candidates we filed today.”
The What? Party did not recruit any candidates, and asked students who approached them to run to work on their campaign instead.
“We have 20 to 30 people helping us out, that’s just the core,” said Cory Peterson who is the What? presidential candidate.
“We want to make sure that if people are voting for us, they are voting for us and our ethics and ideals,” he said.
Peterson also said his campaign does not have any additional candidates because he does not want to be held liable for their actions.
“We are running a clean campaign,” he said.
Probable Cause’s Steve Rinehart could not be reached at deadline.
Mike Nelson, current ASUU vice president, considered running independently for Assembly, “just for fun.,” but chose not to.
“I wanted to focus on other aspects of my life,” Nelson said.
Campaigning will begin on March 23. The two candidates for each position who make it through the primary elections will be announced March 28, and final voting will conclude April 3.