Ohio University’s Student Senate election season slowly launched online as Twitter campaigns began to pop up in the early morning hours Monday.
Three tickets are competing for OU students’ votes: Action, One and Restart.
Restart is the only ticket without current senate members.
Roughly 10 percent of OU’s student voted in last year’s election, with 2,313 votes being cast. The number was an improvement from 2012, when 2,172 votes were cast, but did not come close to the 4,057 that were cast in 2011, according to a previous Post article. Both undergraduate and graduate students will vote in the senate elections on April 17.
The Post sat down with the executive candidates for each ticket and asked for their thoughts on the current senate and how they foresee the organization under their own administrations.
Restart ticket
Twitter: @OURestartSenate
Fundraised: about $500
The Post
:
Why are you running?
Marzec: We want to change the way student government is seen by throwing out the constitution and give everyone as a student a right to vote … to be a voting member of the student government. … There doesn’t seem like much of a point in running for Student Senate because of how dysfunctional and meaningless Student Senate has been in recent years … because there is no system for the power that students actually want. We want to fix that.
The Post
: How would you help students understand university topics such as OHIO Guarantee and the Housing Master Plan?
Marzec: Through education, and I think one of the main accomplishments of the people who are on our ticket is that we have sort of diagnosed the problems on campus and started those conversations. A lot of the issues like rape culture on campus, tuition hikes, administrative raises: Those are all conversations that we started and brought attention to students and also brought attention to Student Senate and the only reason Student Senate had those conversations is because we brought it to (its) attention and push for more just solutions and more just opinions of the situation. I think we’re just going to continue to do that to be in the public, talking to students one-on-one, on a grander scale and to make it one of our main priorities (to) make sure students really know what’s going on in their lives.
The Post
: If elected, what would you like to accomplish as an executive board?
Watson: The major thing is restarting, reforming the Student Senate constitution, making it more inclusive of every student on campus. Also reforming the SAC budget model, slowly transferring it to a participatory budget model where student organizations as a whole can collectively decide how to divide the programing money.
The Post
: What’s one major problem Student Senate currently has that you would like to fix?
Marzec: Its undemocratic structure.
The Post
: Why are you the best candidate for the positions you are running for?
Marzec: We were voted into these positions. Our ticket and surrounding supports, we all chose nominations. … Each one of our executive ticket members (was) nominated and then voted upon based off our leadership tendencies and our integration and support and experience in the community and experience in organizing and social justice and environmental justice and really, we are the best people for this because we have been unwaveringly committed to supporting students and furthering the student struggle. All of us have been doing this for years, fighting for students outside student government with a lot of success and we don’t just do this for three weeks. Student Senate organizes and talks to students for about three weeks during election season, but we do this every day.
Watson: We aren’t in these positions to put on our resumes. While treasurer is a wonderful position and I think I would do a good job, it’s not something I’m hoping to put on my resume. We are doing this to further the opinions of students and to include everyone into the decisions that the treasurer has to make, or the president has to make or the vice president has to make or any position on Student Senate.
McDaniel: I think honestly kind of going off what (Marzec) and (Watson) have already said, the fact that we are basically normal students, you know we didn’t come to Ohio University thinking we’re going to go join the Student Senate and like they said, put it on my resume or be involved in this whole other world that most students don’t even know about - that’s not our goal. Our goal is to be voices for students and to be able to interact with them and then take it to Student Senate and say this is what we have, this is what we have to do, this is what the student body wants, but first and foremost we are average normal students who just so happen to have the skills and perhaps maybe a little more knowledge on the issues that we’re facing right now and we are also good communicators. We know how to talk to people about those issues and how to express that they should also be important to them and how also to learn what’s important to the students and be able to express it to administrators or community members or other people.
The Post
: What do you think of the other candidates?
Marzec: I think they are very much like all the candidates that ran in the past, which doesn’t give me much optimism about their commitment to students.
The Post
: How did you pick the name for your ticket?
Marzec: We want to restart the system of Student Senate … to completely change the way student government is (run) at Ohio University.
@MariaDevito13
md781510@ohiou.edu
