The Engineering Student Council class elections closed Wednesday with uncontested candidate Heather Lee clinching the senior class presidency.
Joffre Andrade will assume the role of senior class vice president, and Stanley Chen and Varun Gulati were both elected class representatives.
The open class elections come after recent ESC constitutional reviews. Members decided to change the Executive Board voting process in a way that will allow SEAS students more access to the elections without changing its fundamental internality.
Before this unprecedented change, the constitution stipulated internal elections of the E-board. The public could listen to candidates’ speeches, but the doors were closed for the council’s discussions. The E-board releases only the ultimate decisions to the student body.
According to current ESC President Peter Valeiras, SEAS ’09, ESC was the only council that did things internally because “we think that because we know the positions we can determine who would be best fit for a position. We also have seen most of the people who have run were already on council...we’ve seen what they’ve done over the past year and we know what they’re capable of.”
The specifics of the constitutional changes to the election process were fine-tuned in a council meeting Monday night.
While outside students will be able to sit in on the deliberations, the elections will be done by secret ballot and closed vote from council members only.
Another stipulation of the new system is that SEAS students running for student body president will need 100 signatures from students, which must include at least 20 signatures from each class and the remaining 20 signatures from any student. For the rest of the E-board positions, potential candidates will need 80 signatures in total, at least 15 per class, with the remaining signatures from any class.
According to Valeiras, past councils haven’t opened the election process to the public because of an inability to compromise on members’ conflicting views of what the election process should look like.
Class of 2009 President Kim Manis said that past councils have only looked at the issue as a question of indirect or direct elections, “so it’s a completely different discussion.” Manis cites trepidation on the part of council members “concerned about breaking a system that is already working” as a reason why these changes haven’t been instituted before.
Council members hope that this will encourage constituents and members of other student organizations to come and participate in the process by asking the candidates questions during the newly opened discussions and see how the elections proceed.
“I think that this definitely will change the SEAS students’ attitude towards the council – it’s so closed that people don’t see us as effective or see what we do,” Valeiras said. “It will be a positive change and students will feel like they have a stake in the process.”
Class of 2011 incumbent president Kamal Yechoor was reelected, and Judy Kim, 2012, won her class’s presidential slot.
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