USAC approves five-day election calendar
By Katie Shepherd
Feb. 18, 2015 3:12 p.m.
This article has been updated at 5:46 p.m. See the bottom of the article for more details.
Spring’s undergraduate student government elections will span from Monday to Friday for the first time in the past eight years, after councilmembers approved an election calendar with several nontraditional dates Tuesday night.
Undergraduate Students Association Council elections typically run between three and four days. The addition of the extra day will cost thousands of dollars in student fees to cover voting software on MyUCLA, said Election Board Chair Shagun Kabra.
Councilmembers discussed the voting period for more than an hour Tuesday night at their weekly meeting, debating whether to extend voting to Monday or Friday to ensure the polls are open for 72 continuous hours, in line with the new election code.
Kabra’s proposed election calendar set voting to last from 9 a.m. Tuesday to 5 p.m. Thursday, but the voting period didn’t include a voting period that met the 72-hour-long requirement.
In past years, voting spanned from Monday to Thursday, but this traditional election calendar was changed last year to last from Tuesday to Friday.
Some councilmembers objected to adding Monday to the voting period because they said they think students historically block vote on that day. Block voting is when groups of students organize and influence others to vote for a particular candidate or slate by coercion.
In the past, some have raised concerns about block voting happening at Monday night meetings in sororities and fraternities. But others have said they think block voting can happen any day of the week at any group meeting.
At Tuesday’s meeting, USAC President Avinoam Baral said he would prefer voting to end on Thursday because he thinks candidates need Friday to rest after elections. Additionally, he said many Jewish students observe the sabbath after sundown on Fridays so it could be inconvenient for Jewish students to participate in elections if results were announced Friday night.
General Representative 2 Sofia Moreno Haq similarly objected to ending voting before 3 p.m. on Friday because Muslim students typically attend prayer between noon and 2 p.m.
Kabra said the council should consider carefully how long voting should extend because the cost of elections increases with additional days. The fall special elections cost about $975 for a 60-hour voting period. Extending polling to 97 hours could cost hundreds of dollars in student fees to use the MyUCLA online voting system for the additional time, he said.
Council voted to approve the Monday through Friday voting period 9-4-0, with Haq, Transfer Representative Negeen Sadeghi-Movahed, General Representative 1 Manjot Singh and Cultural Affairs Commissioner Irmary Garcia opposing the proposal.
After the initial vote, External Vice President Conrad Contreras motioned to recall the vote and consider reducing the voting period to include Monday but not Friday. General Representative 3 Fabienne Roth said she thought removing Friday would suggest that the push for Friday was only based on the desire to avoid Monday voting rather than extending voting to include more communities.
Contreras withdrew his motion to recall the vote and the council proceeded to approve the full election calendar 12-1-0, with only Sadeghi-Movahed opposing the final vote.
The council also approved changes to the USAC election code Tuesday, such as requiring slates interested in running candidates for undergraduate student government positions to register with the Election Board for the first time this year.
Most dates in the election calendar are set for one week earlier in the quarter than last year, in order to give more time for Election Board to organize the elections successfully, Kabra said.
Slates will have until March 13 to file for official recognition and participate in USAC elections.
The approved calendar also set dates for other aspects of the election process, including a due date for candidate applications also set for March 13.
Voting will start at 2 p.m. on Monday, April 27 and end at 3 p.m. Friday, May 1.
The election board will announce the race results a few hours after polls close on the last day of voting.
Update: According to an invoice Kabra received after the publication of this article, USAC’s fall special election cost about $975, not $9,000 as previously reported.
