Student Government Association elections started Friday, August 28, looking for new Executive Board officials, Elected Representatives, and the approval of 74 Constitution amendments. Students can vote online by click on the voting link, logging into their NVU emails, and completing the virtual ballot. Voting will be open until Thursday, September 3, with final results being announced the following Friday, September 4.
All candidacy positions will be voted on by write-in nominations, as all candidates failed to produce 150 petition signatures by Wednesday, August 26. Instead, interested parties have their names listed in parenthesis under their preferred position. These includes Gill MacDonald and Katie Flannigan for SGA President; Renee Chaples for Administrative Vice President; Adrianne Hutchin for Nontraditional Student Representative; and Jasmyn Wilkinson for Class of 2024 Representative.
Should all those interested fill their preferred leadership positions, there will still be vacant positions on the SGA Executive Board. This includes Executive Vice President and Financial Controller, and among the Elected Representatives, such as five Class of 2021 Representatives, five Class of 2022 Representatives, five Class of 2023 Representatives, four Class of 2024 Representatives, five Commuter Representatives, two Non-Traditional Representatives, and one International Representative. These numbers reflect the current SGA Constitution, while some of the proposed amendments include cutting the number of Elected Representative positions to reflect the size of the current student body.
All of the proposed SGA Constitution amendments are to be approved or denied as a whole. Some of these changes include grammatical and spelling errors and changing any statement of “the College” to “the University.” Other proposed amendments included making the Northern Vermont University Leadership Conference mandatory for all Elected Representatives; decreasing the member count of clubs from a minimum of seven to a minimum of five; defining the Board of Elections as the Executive Cabinet (made up of one representative from the RAs, Peer Leaders, Campus Activities Board, and Student Athletic Advisory Committee) and overseen by the SGA President; not permitting alcohol at any SGA club-sanctioned event without prior approval; and participants in SGA or SGA club funded conferences must fully participate in the entirety of the conference.
The Critic plans on publishing a “2020-2021 SGA Elections” series over the next few days to introduce our audience to each person interested in an Executive Board or Elected Representative position and taking a more in-depth look into the proposed SGA Constitution amendments. The first article of this series will be published this afternoon, and all installments are expected to be published by the end Tuesday, September 1.