GSA election sees 3.5 percent decrease in voter turnout
This year’s Graduate Students Association candidates ran unopposed and only needed one vote each to secure their positions. The voter turnout was 9.1 percent, higher than the 2015 election when one seat was contested. (Jintak Han/Assistant Photo editor)
By April Hoang
April 19, 2017 1:20 p.m.
About 9 percent of eligible graduate students voted in this year’s uncontested Graduate Students Association election, down 3.5 percent from last year.
Elections commissioner Anne Blackstock-Bernstein said 1,077 graduate students voted out of a possible 11,834. Only one candidate ran for each of the four positions in the GSA executive cabinet.
“This is a fairly good turnout for an uncontested election,” Blackstock-Bernstein said.
The GSA cabinet must confirm the results by a majority vote at Wednesday’s forum meeting, which begins 6:30 p.m. in the Global Viewpoint Lounge.
The candidates were Michael Skiles for president, Alexander Fung for vice president of Internal Affairs, Parshan Khosravi for vice president of External Affairs and Rebecca Katz for vice president of Academic Affairs. Each candidate only needed one vote to secure their seat.
Skiles is the current GSA president, Khosravi and Fung currently hold nonexecutive positions in GSA and Katz has no experience in graduate student government. All candidates ran with the Moving Forward slate.
[Related: 2017 GSA candidate qualifications and platforms]
Three of the four positions were contested last year, and about 12.6 percent of eligible graduate students voted. In 2015, about 8 percent voted in an election with one contested position.
Voting took place on MyUCLA from April 11 to April 17 this year.
