The Student Assembly elections committee passed Resolution 59 at their Feb. 29 meeting, during which they updated the election rules to include a tabling requirement along with a documented form of student engagement.
Candidates will be required to table at a location determined by the elections committee for a mandatory number of hours, during which they can answer questions and engage with students. This requirement replaces the previous petitioning policy, under which candidates had to gather a certain number of signatures from the student body to ratify their candidacy.
Resolution sponsor Luke Thomas ’27, elections committee chair and director of elections, said that petitioning was replaced with tabling partly because of equity concerns. The time commitment necessary for petitioning may make campaigning difficult for students who have jobs or are on a federal work-study program, Thomas said.
Some S.A. members supported the tabling policy, saying that the policy would save time and increase student engagement with the candidates.
Clyde Lederman ’26, undesignated representative at-large, said that petitioning is very time-consuming and that the verification of signatures could add days to the election and transition processes.
S.A. President Patrick Kuehl ’24 was also concerned about petitions being sent to large group chats, through which certain candidates may garner a disproportionate amount of signatures.
Suraj Parikh ’24, elections committee member and vice president of external affairs, said that though not all candidates resorted to using group chats, engaging with community members would nonetheless be better than canvassing for signatures.
“Spending two hours going around and collecting signatures would be better spent sitting at a table at a busy spot on campus, talking to people,” Parikh said.
S.A. Freshman Representative David Diao ’27 said that the engagement garnered through petitioning felt transactional and “fake,” given the signature requirements.
“I think tabling might be [an effective] solution,” Diao said, “That’s a case where students with a vested interest in the S.A. have an opportunity to reach out and have a conversation with candidates.”
Other members questioned the policy, raising concerns about how many hours of tabling would be required and criticizing the resolution’s stipulation to remove the petition requirement entirely.
Imani Rezaka ’24, S.A. college of arts and sciences representative, questioned how the minimum time requirement would be determined by the S.A. She noted that the tabling requirement could end up being equally inconvenient to candidates as petitioning, depending on the time requirement. However, assembly members are optimistic that the new requirement will help boost S.A. engagement.
Parikh said that in light of historically low turnout in S.A. elections, revising the election rules to encourage more student engagement could potentially improve voter participation. Petitioning involves candidates reaching within their social network to gather signatures, while tabling would expose candidates to the student body at-large, Parikh explained.
“Tabling will get more people to know about the Student Assembly,” Parikh said. “You’ll have more candidates and higher turnout by lowering the barrier of entry to running.”
S.A. Freshman Representative Cion Kim ’27 questioned whether tabling might actually decrease voter engagement, given that it would become the student body’s responsibility to reach out to the S.A. rather than the other way around.
Karys Everett ’25, LGBTQ+ liaison-at-large, acknowledged the merit of tabling, but advocated for some level of petitioning, suggesting that while the signature requirement could be lowered, a record of the number of signatures would be a helpful indicator of community engagement.
“If the point of tabling is to create community engagement, you should be able to prove that you were engaging with the community,” Rezaka said. “That [would be] the goal of having people petition while sitting at the table.”
Everett and Rezaka moved to amend the election rules to include tabling with a petition requirement, but with a reduced signature threshold.
While assembly members considered amending the resolution on the floor to include petitions, Lederman argued that doing so would pose significant inconvenient changes to the election calendar.
“We cannot send out rules to 16,000 students and tell them ‘run’ if we write [these rules] on the [assembly] floor,” Lederman said. “While I appreciate the merits of [petitioning], we just simply cannot add it.”
The vote to amend line 187 of Resolution 59 to include “tabling, with petitions,” was rejected in an 8-12 vote.
S.A. Vice President Claire Ting ’25 argued in favor of tabling with petitioning. She said that though tabling brings a community engagement aspect, there should be a metric to account for engagement.
“We’re moving with a lot of haste to just abolish the [petition] system entirely,” Ting said. “I understand why a lot of representatives have concerns about [abolishing petitions] so abruptly.”
Everett proposed another amendment that would include tabling “with a documented form of engagement” to show both the elections committee and students who were unable to attend the tabling event how many people interacted with the candidate and signed their form.
“It’s a more comprehensive way to compromise between getting rid of petitions altogether and lowering the bar [of entry],” Everett said.
Adam Vinson ’25, S.A. college of agriculture and life sciences representative, argued that the proposed system would be very similar to petitioning. Vinson particularly stressed that candidates who are given a time slot at a location with minimal traffic are at a disadvantage to candidates who table at more popular locations.
Everett responded that time and location would be of minimal significance as there would not be a threshold for the documented form of engagement and emphasized that removing any sort of petitioning with no compromise would be unfair.
“There is no minimum amount of engagement you need to get. If you don’t reach a certain amount of engagement, that’s not going to stop you from being able to run,” Everett said.
The S.A. approved the amendment in a 14-9 vote before passing the amended election rules.