Students will have few options when they head to the virtual polls this week to vote for the 2021-22 SA e-board.
Only four candidates will appear on the ballot — one for president and treasurer, and two for vice president — elections and credentials chair Daniel Deslippe told The Spectrum in an email Monday. Voting will take place this week from Wednesday at 10 a.m. to Friday at 5 p.m. on the SA website.
Students will also be able to vote on whether or not the student activity fee should be mandatory for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic years. Students previously voted in September to make the fee voluntary. The SA has lobbied heavily for students to vote ‘mandatory.’
Nicholas Singh is running unopposed for SA president. Singh has served as a student engagement ambassador and student trustee, according to campaign materials. This is the first time a candidate for president has run unopposed since 2018; it also happened in 2008.
Singh appears in campaign materials with vice presidential candidate Steven Holguin, who has served as the events coordinator for LASA, a peer transition assistant and an orientation leader.
Holguin has one challenger for vice president, Montana Desabio. Current SA Assembly speaker Austin Wolfgang rounds out the slate of SA e-board candidates, as the only nominee for treasurer.
Last Tuesday, SA extended the petition deadline for president and treasurer after only one candidate for each race received the necessary amount of petition signatures to run for those respective positions.
In the same resolution, the SA announced that unlike in previous years, candidates cannot run as parties, because the “time deadline for declaring party status was by the original mandatory meeting, which already took place, and no one did so.” However, candidates are allowed to publicly indicate their support for other candidates.
All three SA e-board members make a flat stipend of $15,750 for the 2020-21 academic year.
The Spectrum asked Deslippe for the candidates’ platforms, but was informed to “reach out to candidates for comment on their platforms and goals.”
The current SA e-board — president Nelaje Branch, vice president Ghuzlan Alhadad and treasurer Sayan Tratman — will not return for the 2021-22 academic year.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article claimed an SA president had not run unopposed since 2015. It has been corrected to 2018.
The news desk can be reached at news@ubspectrum.com
