Before Tuesday, there were three candidates on the ballot for president of Syracuse University’s Student Association. In other words, it’s a normal election year, said Jane Hong, current vice president of SA.

This “normal” election — which took a turn on Tuesday when presidential candidate Andrew Brendel suddenly dropped out of the race — comes one year after a whirlwind cycle that shook up the dynamics of SA. Last year, there was only one ticket on the ballot, and it belonged to Hong and SA President Aysha Seedat, who both had previous experience as members of the student organization.

But along with Seedat and Hong were three other teams of presidential and vice presidential candidates who had not put their names on the ballot. Instead, they were write-in candidates, who Hong said may have decided to run for student government due to the fall 2014 sit-in by THE General Body, a group of students that aimed grievances at the SU administration.

But while last year’s election season was unprecedented in its number of write-in candidates, this year’s election — which features no write-in candidates — was also an outlier. Before Tuesday, there was an official ticket of president and vice president with no SA experience, as Brendel and his running mate, Tom Duszkiewicz, had never participated in SA before.

And along with rules passed this session to restrain the campaigns of write-in candidates, SA is working this week during elections to place a check on who the next president and vice president of SA will select for their cabinets.

Chase Guttman | Staff Photographer

Write-in candidates are distinct from official candidates because when SU students go to cast their votes on MySlice, the names of official candidates appear with boxes to be checked next to their names. But there are little white, to-be-typed-in boxes for the names of write-in candidates.

While that burden of having to type out a name that does not appear elsewhere on MySlice may seem like an imposition to running a campaign, Hong said write-in candidates can hand their laptops or phones to students and simply ask the students to type in the candidates’ names. Official candidates are restricted from creating those polling stations, Hong said.

Following last year’s election, SA implemented new bylaws to its constitution to reform elections and put restrictions on write-in candidates’ campaigns in an effort to equate them to official campaigns. The added bylaw reads that “write-in candidates are held to the same campaign rules and guidelines” that official candidates are held by, according to an updated version of the bylaws provided by SA Board of Elections & Membership Chair Tracey Ford.

Among those campaign rules is the prohibiting of campaigning in any on-campus computer clusters, within 100 feet of an official polling location or within the Schine Student Center during the operation of that polling location. Providing any device that would create additional polling places is also prohibited, according to the bylaws posted on SA’s website.

The extension of these bylaws to write-in candidates helps create an equal playing field for all SA candidates, Hong said, adding that last year’s campaign season was “so clearly not an equal playing field for everyone.”

Hong reflected on last year’s election, when she and Seedat approached students to pitch their initiatives for SA and ask the students to vote for them. She and Seedat could only tell students to log into MySlice on their own and vote, whereas write-in candidates were tabling and having students fill in the candidates’ names on their laptops.

“But they were still running the same kind of campaign, they still had the same reach that we did, so it was I think frustrating last year as a candidate because we just had so many rules and restrictions but they were able to do whatever they wanted,” Hong said.

On this year’s lack of write-in candidates, Ford, the chair of SA’s Board of Elections & Membership, said Seedat and Hong’s strong run as candidates may have deterred students from running as write-in candidates and instead encouraged them to petition to get on the official ballot.

But regardless of the lack of write-in candidates, SA is still making moves to create checks on potential presidents and vice presidents.

Also on the ballot is a resolution that would give oversight to Ford and the chair of SA’s Administrative Operations Committee on any selections for the president and vice president’s cabinet, said Eric Evangelista, SA recorder and presidential candidate. If the resolution is passed, the people selected for the cabinet would have to appear before the committee chairs so they could approve or deny them before the assembly can vote on their confirmation, Evangelista said.

Evangelista added that the resolution won’t take all the power away from the president and vice president because if they feel strongly about a candidate, they can send them straight to the assembly. But if the Ad Op and BEM chairs feel strongly about a candidate not being appointed, he said, it is their responsibility to speak up during the assembly’s confirmation process.

Before Brendel announced his campaign suspension, Evangelista said he and his running mate, Joyce LaLonde, would work hard to campaign for the resolution in the case that he and LaLonde or the other presidential and vice presidential ticket — consisting of Charlie Mastoloni and Jessica Brosofsky — were not elected, considering those tickets were the only ones with SA experience.

In the case that Brendel and Duszkiewicz were elected, Evangelista said, the resolution would allow assembly representatives to still have “some input in their cabinet positions because (the representatives) are the ones who have experience and who know that the organization is best-served by selecting certain types of individuals” for each position.

Published on April 13, 2016 at 11:22 pm

Contact Alexa: atorrens@syr.edu