Two special Undergraduate Assembly elections have filled the student governing body's vacant seats, but both experienced low voter turnout.
The Nominations and Elections Committee held the fall general election for the UA and Class Boards in September, but two of the 15 College representative seats were left unfilled due to a lack of students running for the positions. The NEC held a special election in October, which College sophomore Keerthi Jayaraman won with 22 total votes. Since Jayaraman was the only candidate to reach the 88 signatures required to secure a spot on the ballot, a second special election was held in November.
College senior Anish Welde also ran unopposed in the November special election and secured election to the final vacant seat with just 12 votes. College junior and NEC Vice Chair for Elections Zarina Iman acknowledged that the turnout was low and said the NEC is exploring reinstating incentives to encourage students to vote, as the group has done in the past but discontinued due to COVID-19.
Of the 6,400 students in the College, only first years were ineligible to vote in the special elections, demonstrating that only a small fraction of the thousands of eligible College students voted.
The NEC has also historically struggled with low turnout in special elections. A special election to fill the UA’s Nursing seat last year garnered 17 votes, and in February 2019, a Wharton representative special election garnered 108 total votes — just 5% of the Wharton undergraduate population.
Welde and Jayaraman were the only candidates to secure the 88 required signatures for College representatives to appear on the ballot in their respective elections, Iman said. Prior to the fall general election, the NEC reduced the signature requirement by 33% for each position.
The newly elected representatives agreed that getting the required number of signatures to appear on the ballot was a larger burden than campaigning because they ran unopposed.
“Once you were on the ballot, you only really needed one person's vote to win,” Welde said. “So for me, most of it was just trying to get people’s signatures.”
Because both candidates ran unopposed, there was less pressure for the candidates to campaign and promote the elections, Iman said.
She said that in the future, the NEC may reinstate incentives to boost turnout, like discounts at the frozen yogurt store Kiwi, that the NEC previously used to promote elections. The NEC did not have incentives in the fall general election or in either of the special elections.
Unlike past special elections, Iman said, it was not difficult to get candidates to run, although some were unable to secure enough signatures to appear on the ballot.
“At the end of the day, the NEC is pretty happy with how the process turned out,” Iman said.
Special elections are usually required to fill seats from Nursing or Engineering, she said, both of which have fewer students than the College and are therefore more difficult to recruit candidates from. In 2019, two special elections were required to fill four Engineering seats left vacant during the general election.
Iman said the NEC was pleased with the turnout of the September general election, despite the 46.6% decrease in turnout, because it was the first all-online election with no in-person campaigning. She said she suspected turnout was much lower for the special elections because while the NEC does promote upcoming elections, much of the publicity for the elections depends on candidates themselves campaigning.
Despite the low turnout that brought them into office, both Jayaraman and Welde are excited to be working on the UA. Jayaraman said she initially missed the deadline to run for the fall general election and was glad that two openings remained and could be filled in a special election.
Jayaraman said that the number of important decisions administration is making in light of COVID-19 inspired her to run and become involved in these conversations.
Welde said he decided to run during his senior year because his PPE capstone project examines how Penn can ensure better compliance with the Student Campus Compact and he wanted to be able to advocate for these policies to the administration on the UA.
“I thought joining the UA would be a really great way for me to try to take that pet project in the class and see if I could talk to administrators and actually get them to figure out ways to improve the Campus Compact,” Welde said.
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