After an election period fraught with delays and a lack of candidacies, the University Student Senate spring semester elections concluded on Monday at midnight.
The elections to fill the eight open senate seats began early in February, following an unannounced nine-day delay allegedly caused by a newly implemented voting system.
The election results for the two separate voting periods that took place will be released by the Registrar’s Office.
Simon Henschel, a USS co-chair, estimated that the results will be released mid-week on the week of Feb. 22. Despite the original elections start date of Jan. 25 for all schools, elections were held from Feb. 3 to Feb. 10 for Parsons, Lang, SPE, and Jazz, and from Feb. 16 to Feb. 22 for Mannes and NSSR.
Elections for the New School for Drama did not take place, as there were no candidate submissions for the school. The Drama school’s senate seat will remain open “until the senate deliberates how to proceed with the open senate position,” Mr. Henschel commented.
With regards to the original nine-day delay, USS senators said in an email that preparing the new software was “burdensome and complicated,” citing coordination of the initiative’s many parts as the main cause of the delay.
“After learning from this process, this system, of course, can be implemented in a timelier manner,” senators said.
“A delay of elections has not occurred in recent memory of the Student Senate, therefore there has never been an opportunity to announce a delay,” they added.
USS senators noted that they hope this new system works effectively for future elections.
The previous system allowed students to vote multiple times, and it allowed access to every school’s ballot, regardless of which school a student was enrolled in so a student at Lang could vote for the Jazz senate seat, for example.
The old system also had a complicated post-voting process, as students were required to submit their N-numbers. The system did not have set parameters for the way N-numbers could be inputted, leading to variation in the ways students entered the numbers, which in turn led to difficulty and confusion in post-voting verification.
The USS wanted to ensure that elections would be designed in “a more robust, effective, and transparent manner,” representatives said in the email to the Free Press.
The new election system sends an email to each New School student with a unique link to the ballot. Students are limited to voting for their own school’s senate seats and the system bars them from voting within their school more than once. BA/BFA students may place votes for each of the schools that they are enrolled in.
The new system is also hosted on the survey software platform Qualtrics, managed by the Registrar’s Office, as opposed to the previous USS-managed system.
The late start to the USS’s spring semester comes after a controversial fall semester for the student government that saw seven senators resign, the last one of which faced possible impeachment and eventual censure for racially offensive behavior during senate meetings.
