The Elections Commission will meet Thursday to confirm the results of the Freshman Student Senate election, according to senior in political science Chair Andrew Tucker.
The meeting will be at 7:30 p.m. in 301 Witherspoon Student Center, and the commission will address any issues anyone had with the procedures or results of the election.
Eleven winners were announced for the freshmen Senate seats, and Igor Romashko filled one of the two vacant first-year graduate student positions.
Greg Doucette, Student Senate president, said it is typical for less graduate students to be involved in Student Senate.
“We’ve had an ongoing problem for years of graduate students [filling positions], largely because being a graduate student is a big academic commitment,” he said. “Reading thousands of pages a week, having classes that are late at night and then doing Student Senate on top of it is difficult.”
The first-year seat is not the only graduate position left open, Doucette, a senior in computer science, said.
“I think we have five total vacancies out of the seats that are opened to graduate students,” he said.
The elections commission has not received any official contentions over the freshmen elections, Tucker said.
Voter participation was about equal with past years, Tucker said, with 603 students casting votes.
While that number is just a “fragment” of the amount of votes cast in the student body general elections, he said when considering that only freshmen can vote, the percentage of students in that class is more reasonable.
Freshmen are typically less engaged in Student Government, as they are getting used to college life and also beginning their first round of testing, according to Tucker.
Adam Shelton, a freshman in First Year College, said he knew about the elections because he lived near a candidate.
But Caroline Carswell, an undeclared freshman, said some students were uninformed about how to vote and what Web site to go to.
The more students are running election, the more people will typically vote, according to Doucette.
“I think turnout was good considering we had fewer people running this year than before,” he said.
About 20 students ran for positions, and Doucette said usually when students run in “slates,” in which they campaign together, the people together on a slate will win.
“This year you had several different slates of candidates, but only one or two from each slate won,” he said.
Only nine first-year graduate students voted in the election for the graduate seat, Tucker said.
For the vacant first-year graduate seat, Doucette said he can appoint someone to the position.
If someone applies for the position, he said he will consider them, but if no graduate students file for the job, Doucette can fill it with an undergraduate student.
“I’ll only do that if we can’t find students that are able to take the job,” he said.