Elections for the executive officers of the Tennessee Tech Student Government Association will take place Tuesday, April 14.
Attempted election rule changes were put forth by the Executive Election Commission Committee of SGA, but were halted until the Fall 2015 semester. Because of this, the 2014 edition of the rules are being enforced for this semester’s SGA executive and senate elections.
“The new election rules that we approved will be effective July 1,” current SGA President Emily McDonald said. “For the SGA elections this year, we are following the previous election rules. All of our policy should be updated a year or semester prior.”
According to McDonald, SGA faculty adviser and Vice President of Student Affairs Marc Burnett told her that election rules could not be changed halfway through the semester.
The main revisions that were attempted for election rule changes included setting a $750 budget on all campaigns, the banning of candidates’ ability to campaign door-to-door in the residence halls, the banning of the collection of T-numbers and/or pin numbers from students in attempts to vote by proxy for a candidate, and the eliminating of the ability for a candidate to hand out bribes to be exchanged for votes. Additionally, a clause stating that all candidates must all be full-time students was included in the attempted rule change.
McDonald said that despite the attempted changes, all candidates for this semester’s election are eligible to run office.
“All candidates are at full-time status and meet the GPA requirement,” McDonald said. “Both the old version of the SGA Constitution and new updated SGA Constitution state that a candidate must be a full-time student.”
“The 2015 election rules added that statement about ‘full-time’ so that it reflected the verbiage that is stated in the Constitution,” McDonald said. “That statement had previously never been stated in the rules, but it has always been stated in the SGA Constitution.”
McDonald said that in the future, it would be the responsibility of the SGA to update rules one semester prior to any election.
“That is my fault for not taking the time to update the SGA election rules last semester,” McDonald said.
Running for SGA President is economics major Nathan Cole. Cole is currently the Secretary of State for SGA and is a member of Phi Delta Theta. Opposing Cole is chemical engineering graduate student Bobby Adams. Adams is currently the chairman of the Chapter 606 Student Moneys Allocation Committee and a member of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.
The election for treasurer in this year’s race is between current Freshman SGA Senator Chase Womble and Miranda Stoltz.
Womble is a basic business major and is from Maryville, Tennessee while Stoltz is a political science and sociology major from Sevierville.
In this year’s election of vice president and secretary of the SGA, both have just one person running for the offices. Savannah Savage is running unopposed in the race for secretary and Nick Russell is running unopposed for vice president.
“We have had many great leaders as part of SGA in the past,” said Russell, a sophomore mechanical engineering major from Chattanooga. “But in my time here, we have not had a clear vision of how we wanted to impact student’s lives. It will be my mission as SGA Vice President to reach out to students across our campus, find out what would improve their experiences here at Tech, and make that SGA’s vision over the next year.”
The polls for the election will open at 8 a.m. Tuesday, April 14 and will close at 5 p.m. the same day.
Additionally on Tuesday’s ballot, there will be a section where students can write-in their suggestions for the Fall S.O.L.O. concert’s artists. The fall S.O.L.O. concert will be from the Pop genre. According to McDonald, these suggestions will be reviewed, and a ballot will be formed consisting of five to six artists that are within the budget of S.O.L.O. concert fund. This ballot will be voted on during the April 23 SGA Senate election vote.
“Students’ input will be helpful for us so that we can compile a list of artists that the students are interested in having at TTU, McDonald said. “From the artists that are written-in, we will check the artist’s availability and pricing.”
According to the election rules, results from the election will be posted outside the SGA office on the first floor of the Roaden University Center as soon as the votes are calculated.
