Poor student participation in this year’s Associated Students of the University of Utah elections is causing a shortage of candidates and parties.
Only two political parties are running for office and 14 Senate and Assembly seats are uncontested in the election.
“I’ve been surprised by the low participation; it’s rare to only have a two-party election,” said Toby Collett, vice presidential candidate for the BLOC Party. “Maybe students are just a little burned out with the whole process.”
The BLOC Party has arguably already won five Senate and nine Assembly seats by default because the Big Idea Party failed to recruit enough candidates to run for the positions. Write-in candidates could potentially still win these seats, but ASUU elections registrar Jeffrey Mathis said the likelihood of a write-in candidate winning is slim.
Lindsey Sine, presidential candidate for the Big Idea Party, said it’s a bad sign that only two parties are competing in elections.
“Some students don’t even know what ASUU is, which is somewhat concerning considering that ASUU has a budget of over $1 million worth of student fees,” she said.
Mathis said he doesn’t think that there is any less interest or participation this year, just that fewer parties happened to come together.
“I knew of several other planned parties that just never panned out,” he said.
Mathis said a potential reason why so many Senate and Assembly seats were left uncontested this year is because there are only two parties.
“Usually most parties don’t fill their rosters, but because there is more than two parties, the seats get filled,” he said.
Sine said she originally had enough candidates to fill her roster but some of them backed out at the last minute.
“There were potential candidates for all those spots?some people just couldn’t commit the time, and we had to accept that,” she said.
Sine said she thinks so few students are involved in the campaign because fund raising for a campaign is difficult.
“If anything, I think low participation stems from the reliance on money that is involved in the campaign process,” she said.
Mathis said he thinks ASUU did enough in raising awareness for the campaign.
“Filling the seats is the parties’ responsibility, we did all we could,” he said.
Freshman Teryn Bird said she didn’t even know elections were going on until several weeks after the filling deadline for candidates had expired.
“I’m pretty involved on campus, and I still don’t know very much about ASUU and the elections process,” she said. “(ASUU) could do a lot more to inform students.”
Both the BLOC and the Big Idea Parties resolve to do more to increase involvement in the elections next year.
