As of Sunday, Student Senate President Mitchell Moravec has announced his appointment of a new chair of the Board of Elections in time to be heard at the Student Senate meeting Wednesday.

Moravec, a fifth-year studying material science and engineering and psychology, has appointed Anna Kate Whitfield, a fourth-year studying political science, as the board’s chair.

According to Student Body President Jackie Gonzalez’s Executive Order Number 5, Moravec was given the authority to appoint a candidate after Anderson Shumate, a graduate student majoring in international studies, declined the position.

“It was given to me to do by Jackie when she made Executive Order Number 5,” Moravec said. “All she really [said] was, ‘Mitchell we need this chair, we need these two commissioners, it needs to go through Senate and it needs to go through the Appointments Committee’… I reflected a little bit about our previous processes, we set up an application, we tried to get applications, we interviewed them, and we made selections.” 

Due to the upcoming Student Government elections in February, the period for applications was Wednesday, Jan. 17 through Friday, Jan. 19.

“I needed to close it on Friday night so I could start actually doing the interviews and basically having someone selected by this Monday, which is when we needed to announce it before getting it approved by the Senate,” Moravec said. “If we had not had a person announced at this time, we would have gone through more obstacles because we get closer to the election and we needed a board to actually run our election.”

According to Moravec, the Appointments Committee met several times throughout the weekend to approve the process that he used. He also said the appointment will need to be approved by a two-thirds majority vote from the Student Senate on Wednesday. Pending Senate approval, Whitfield will begin the position immediately.