Monroe Park SGA holds reelection after failing to announce leadership results
Illustration by Sagal Hassan
The Monroe Park SGA will be holding an online reelection for the 2016-17 student body president and vice president beginning Tuesday, April 12.
The new election comes after the SGA failed to officially release the winners of the original election held in mid-March. According to the SGA Constitution, results should be made public no more than five days after voting concludes.
“Our leaders for this year were elected on the platform of transparency,” said SGA clerk Katie Gallant. “Our organization as a whole has drifted away from that. This is very bleak to me. We need to figure out how to get ourselves together. How are we going to represent the student body if we can’t even represent ourselves well?”
According to the April 4 SGA Senate minutes, all the original candidates will be running in the reelection due to two grievances filed to the SGA’s Judiciary regarding the original proceedings.
The grievances apparently stemmed from candidates following different Constitutional bylaws due to the SGA website not being properly updated after last year. The minutes state the SGA Membership committee “did not follow through with conducting a proper election.”
“Those who were in the election felt like there were a lot of different rules going around,” said Sen. Sarah Kilmon, who is running for vice president. “Different candidates were following different rules.”
The April 4 minutes also state the SGA intends to notify the student body of this week’s reelection through social media. The SGA Judiciary will run the new election and there will be no candidate tabling or debates.
The meeting minutes also indicate confusion and frustration amongst SGA members regarding the grievances responsible for stalling results. Furthermore, the minutes state this is “really a failure on all the branches,” and the website has still not been updated — therefore the new bylaws are not available to students.
“I feel like we are almost punishing the wrong people,” said Sen. Tammie Goode. “Having to redo an election seems unfair.”
SGA Secretary Ava Hassas said appealing the complaints could take just as much time as redoing the election, and this time the candidates will be responsible for their own PR because the matter is time sensitive.
“We are going to look bad to the student body no matter what we do,” Gallant said. “We need to never do this again. It’s messy.”
The grievances and judicial hearing are available to students, according the the April 4 meeting minutes.
Executive Editor, Sarah King
Sarah is a junior in the honors college studying political science and philosophy of law. She is a copyeditor for I NK Magazine and reporter for the Capital News Service wire. Last spring, Sarah worked as an editorial intern for Congressional Quarterly Researcher and SAGE Business Researcher in Washington, D.C. // Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
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