While a new constitution is in the works to create a more sound and receptive student governing body, the Associated Students of Madison continue to show little results as demonstrated by continued low voter turnout in its election Wednesday.
ASM’s election had a 5.1 percent turnout of the overall University of Wisconsin student body, while 11 percent of the freshman class participated in voting for their freshmen elects.
According to Katherine Tondrowski, chair of the Student Election Commission, the turnout has been consistent with past records.
“The turnout is so small because it’s a freshman election, and the freshman class is small in comparison with the whole student body. We’ve had an extensive effort to get [students] to vote, but there is also a national election going on,” Tondrowski said.
Part of the effort aimed at getting students to vote was “themed elections.” Candidates picked out superhero running mates with whom they compared characteristics.
Brad Silber, press contact for the student election commission, provided an example of a possible strategy: “He fights crime, and I fight high prices in the lunchroom.”
Despite advertisements in both student newspapers and groups on Facebook, Tondrowski said 5 percent is still a small voter turnout.
One hypothesis, according to Tondrowski, is the majority of students who show up to vote are involved in ASM already, and so they find out about the elections through that channel. But there is no way of knowing exactly where the voter demographics lie, with the exception by looking at the different departments within UW, she said.
“Letters and Sciences is the biggest school, so they had the most voters,” Tondrowski added.
Of the six freshmen offices up for grabs, four Student Council seats were filled by Jamie Stark, Rebecca Newman, Axel Hernandez and Khamseng Yang. The two Student Services Finance Committee seats went to sophomore Tyler Junger and freshman Brandon Williams.
On the other side of Memorial Union, SSFC held one of many listening sessions for students to hear the proposal for the new constitution, raise questions and make comments.
The turnout for the listening session was proportionally higher than that of the election, and 58 percent of student groups were represented at the listening session.
“The listening sessions have been helpful. We’ve been compiling the feedback on a weekly basis … and next week we’ll begin the process of creating a second draft,” SSFC Chair Kurt Gosselin said.
This session was geared specifically toward the 19 General Student Services Fund groups on campus, which are stakeholders in ASM because the student government controls their budgets.
Jeff Wright, chair of the ASM Constitutional Committee, said the committee wanted to ensure all of the groups concerns were heard.
During the session, Wright said the groups were raising legitimate concerns and the committee would be discussing all of them before deciding on a final draft.
Plans for the next stages of the committee are to discuss questions, and comments from the groups while continuing listening sessions and developing a more functional constitution.
A final draft is expected by December, and ASM hopes to adopt the constitution in February.
