While graduate student voter turnout increased slightly this year compared to 2012, fourteen graduate students were elected to Graduate Student Council (GSC) seats in this year’s ASSU elections, with the Graduate School of Business (GSB)’s seat still pending because of a five-way tie — with one write-in vote each — for first place.
While prospective undergraduate senators lobby for votes and student groups flyer for special fees, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) is struggling to do something much more elementary: finding enough candidates to fill elected positions and looking to turn around an institutional history of low interest and accomplishment.
Trusheim has held many different positions within the ASSU during his time at Stanford, including a stint as Elections Commissioner in 2011.
The recent ASSU elections were marred by disrespectful and hurtful debate and discussion. Many students have expressed concerns about the distribution of unsolicited bulk emails, text messages and campus blogs and we are reviewing all complaints.
Each and every point made by Senator Palpatine, including the personal attacks, we have made in person. In dining halls, we laugh off “SMD is crazy,” but over email, we trip over ourselves to suspend people for violating the Fundamental Standard.
Apathetically abstaining from participating in elections as voters and candidates only ensures that the status quo will live on.
With our gaze fixated on the spectacular explosions and scintillating gossip emitted by what somehow managed to be simultaneously the least competitive and most bitter electoral campaign in recent memory, I think we may be overlooking a more important but less visible story: the story of the deep malaise that has gradually infiltrated politics on this campus.
Campus has erupted over the past 36 hours in a firestorm of commentary on the actions and subsequent criticisms-turned-attacks on ASSU Vice President and Executive candidate Stewart MacGregor-Dennis ‘13.