Madeleine Coles
Staff Writer
The election results for next year’s Associated Students of Idaho State University (ASISU) positions are in, but if the voter turnout is anything to go by, not many students care.
This year 205 students voted for the executive ticket, the president and vice president for the 2016-2017 academic year – 205 out of 9,418 students eligible to vote. This means that only 2.18 percent of students voted, a 10.9 percent drop from the number of students who voted for the executive ticket in the 2015-2016 elections.
The highest voter turnout came from the ticket for the College of Arts and Letters, with 4.38 percent of eligible students voting; the ticket for the College of Technology had the lowest numbers, with just 1.33 percent of students voting.
To put this in perspective, the 2015 election saw the highest percentage of voters from the College of Science and Engineering ticket, for which 16.11 percent of students voted and the lowest percentage from the ticket for the Idaho Falls Vice President, for which 3.08 percent of eligible students voted.
Current ASISU president Mackenzie Smith described the lack of student voters as “unfortunate” but said that it is an anomaly when compared to election results from recent years.
However, she also said that it certainly wasn’t the lowest voter turnout that ASISU had ever seen.
That fact could not be verified by The Bengal.
Both Smith and ASISU elections commissioner Hailey Dugan placed at least part of the blame for the lack of student voters on the lack of students running for ASISU.
In this election, every position was running uncontested and in fact, there were 10 write-in candidates for various senator positions because not enough people ran to fill all needed positions.
“I think the low voter turnout stemmed from the lack of competition between all of the positions,” Dugan said. “It wasn’t much of a race so that didn’t create interest around campus.”
And while the low number of candidates could have been a major reason for the low number of voters, Smith and Dugan also admitted that ASISU could have advertised the election more thoroughly to the student body, a concept that it would seem students agree with.
In a poll of 30 ISU students, not one student said they voted in the election; perhaps more shocking is that only 13 students said they were even aware the election was happening, and only seven said they had received any kind of information about the election.
Dugan, however, stated that all students were sent an email regarding information about both the election and what a student needs to do if they wish to run for office. She cites student negligence as one possible reason for why so many students claimed to have not received any election information.
“From what I heard around campus in the aftermath, many students deleted those emails without even opening them,” Dugan said.
She added that if she could do the election over again, she likely would have made more print material available to students throughout the campus.
Smith agreed that changes could have possibly been made to the advertisement of the election but said that the advertisement efforts put forth by ASISU this year were the same as they have been in previous years.
But in regards to any solid plans that ASISU has made to improve voting numbers, Smith said that plans were often disjointed due to the new senate and executives that filter through every year.
“We talk about it, but then leave it for the next executives in the hopes they will use our outcomes for future years,” Smith said.
