Duke Student Government will be holding its Senate and class elections next week.
Undergraduate students will vote for senators and vice presidents for each of the seven DSG committees. In addition, each class will also elect a class president and vice president. The link to electronic ballots will be emailed to students April 14. Voters in freshman, sophomore and junior classes will fill up to two Senate seats on each committee, although there are no candidates running for some seats. The entire undergraduate student body will vote for each of the committee vice presidents. A total of 53 candidates are running for the various positions.
“It looks to be a pretty smooth process with a lot of candidates,” said senior Max Fischer-Zernin, DSG Attorney General who is in charge of running the election process.
The seven committees which have vice presidential and senatorial races are the academic affairs, Durham and regional affairs, equity and outreach, facilities and environment, residential life, services and social culture.
Most vice president candidates are running unopposed, with the exception of candidates for vice president of academic affairs. Sophomores Annie Adair and Tara Bansal, both current senators for academic affairs, are running for that position.
In addition, the junior class president, senior class president and senior class vice president candidates are also running unopposed. The sophomore president and vice president races have a large number of candidates, however, with seven students running for president and five running for vice president.
Fischer-Zernin noted that just because a candidate is running unopposed doesn’t mean they won’t have to campaign.
“Even positions which have only one candidate still have the write-in option, so [those candidates] still need to campaign enough to make sure they get a fair amount of votes,” he explained.
On the ballot, voters will be asked to select their top-two choices for each applicable position. Asking voters to rank up to seven candidates, in the case of the sophomore class president race, would be too complex, Fischer-Zernin said.
“In terms of getting people to vote, it will be too much of a hindrance to make them rank seven people,” Fischer-Zernin said.
DSG has recently struggled with low voter turnout. Only about 30 percent of students voted in March’s presidential election and only 38 percent voted in February’s Young Trustee election.
“We’re going to do our best to reach out to people beyond the email [which contains the link to the ballot],” Fischer-Zernin said. “We also encourage candidates to let people know to vote.”
Each candidate receives an allotment of money from DSG for their campaign which is the maximum they are allowed to spend. Senate, class president and class vice president candidates receive 25 dollars and committee vice presidents receive 50 dollars. Candidates must also follow the Election Rules and Procedures voted on by the DSG Senate, which governs campaign fairness and limits on advertising.
Candidates
Senior class president
Nandita Singh
Senior class vice president
Ben Lee
Junior class president
Kavita Jain
Sophomore class president
Istvan Urban, John David Strickland, Thabit Pulak, Luke Duchemin, Divya Dhulipala, Reid Patton, Jack Forlines
Sophomore class vice president
Blair Horner, Alexander Doan, Amir Williams, Austin Wu, Michael Gattas
Academic affairs committee VP
Sophomores Annie Adair, Tara Bansal
Academic affairs senator, class of 2016
Brian Hopkins
Academic affairs senator, class of 2017
Jessica Tanner, Kavita Jain
Academic affairs senator, class of 2018
Antoniu Chirnoaga, Craig Kinney, Taylor Panzer, Jonathon Gillespie, Andrew Distell
Durham and regional affairs VP
Sophomore Tanner Lockhead
Durham and regional affairs senator, class of 2016
Nicholas Andrade
Durham and regional affairs senator, class of 2018
Liz Brown, Gwen Geng, John Lu, Sean Gilbert
Equity and outreach VP
Sophomore Ilana Weisman
Equity and outreach senator, class of 2016
Jay Ruckelshaus, Jay Sullivan
Equity and outreach senator, class of 2018
Riyanka Ganguly, Jeremy Gottlieb, Jacqueline Monetta, Jason Rahimzadeh, Sonali Biswas
Facilities and environment VP
Sophomore Michael Norwalk
Facilities and environment senator, class of 2018
Jared Katzen
Residential life VP:
Sophomore George Mellgard
Residential life senator, class of 2017
Zoe Bakker
Residential life senator, class of 2018
Diane Hadley, Lizzie Speed
Services VP
Junior JP Lucaci
Services senator, class of 2017
Mitchell Grant
Services senator, class of 2018
Akash Patel, Lukas Gschwandtner, Dylan Gambardella, Shivani Shah, Moses Wayne
Social culture VP
Junior Bryan Dinner
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