CHIEF RETURNING OFFICER Pooja Ajit

As the Chief Returning Officer for VUSAC this semester, my main duty is to run VUSAC elections this semester. Elections period is fast approaching with nominations opening on March 1st Everyone be sure to look out for the nominations package and run! These elections will result in most of the council for next year being elected with the President, Vice-presidents, Commissioner and Ex-Officio positions all available. I have begun preparing the nominations package and the VUSAC President and I decided on the elections dates a few weeks ago.

This semester, the VUSAC executives and I conducted a review of the ERC to determine what needs to be changed or updated. There was discussion over whether to remove campaigning on Facebook as an option given that no one used it for the past few election cycles. However, we decided to review again after the upcoming elections end. The main changes made were to account for campaigning and voting periods overlapping from now on. During the fall election, we decided to allow campaigning and voting periods to fully overlap rather than no campaigning being allowed during voting period. I believe this helped increase voter turnout and engagement therefore, this is something that will be done for future elections too.

Like the previous election, this one will allow campaigning online and in-person! This is to make campaigning easier for those who may not come to campus as often and hopefully encourages more candidates to apply.

One of the challenges we faced last election cycle was people not running for bigger, heavier workload roles like Execs and Commissioners. I had spoken to the VPI, Jackson about continuing Instagram takeovers this semester to increase visibility for these roles and make them seem manageable. The Instagram takeovers seem to be going well and I will be doing one later this semester to explain more about the CRO role and elections too. Given that there will be more candidates this election cycle, I will also need to be more vigilant about postering as I anticipate that possibly being a problem given that so many candidates will be vying for similar postering spots. I will tackle this by getting help from the dons and VUSAC exec that are not running while also trying to check more myself.

I am excited to hold Q&A sessions during nominations period to possibly entice more students to run (look out for more information on those in the coming weeks). Some students have already expressed interest in running so I expect the upcoming elections to be quite interesting and aim to maintain or even increase engagement and voter turnout this semester.

It’s been great working on VUSAC this year and I hope to facilitate a smooth elections cycle!