Student Council voted last night to change its election rules in hopes the process will increase student involvement.
"These bylaw changes will clean up the bylaws and hopefully institute a set of election rules that spell out what candidates can and can't do," said Executive Vice-President Matt Madden.
The election rule changes will focus on increasing the number of candidates in schools with a smaller student population.
The number of signatures needed for a candidate to run in the upcoming election was lowered for every school except for the College in order to increase participation in Council elections.
In the past, there have been more candidates running from the College than from other schools.
Students in the College have an easier time obtaining signatures because of the large pool of students from which they can draw. This makes declaring their candidacy easier.
With the changes to the nomination process, candidates in schools other than the College will be more likely to run in elections.
"We wanted to make it easier for more people to run," said Stephen Wright, vice president of administration and overseer of election committee.
"We'd like to make it easier for smaller schools to participate in elections by lowering the amount of signatures needed to put someone on the ballot," Madden said.
The amount of signatures needed for University-wide offices, College and class presidents have not changed from previous years.
Besides changing the number of signatures needed, the new election rules contained a change in the monetary commitments of the candidates.
The campaign donations and expenditures regulations will now allow candidates in University-wide elections to spend up to $200. This is an $80 increase from last year.
Of the $200, $60 of the funds may be used from candidates' own pockets. But the remaining $140 must be donated to the candidate by other students or student organizations.
The maximum amount of money that may be allotted to a candidate from each organization is $20.
The election changes will also place responsibility for rule enforcement on departments such as Residence Life Office and the Housing Division, instead of the Student Council Election Committee.
"This will give the election committee more responsibility and more power in terms of rules and regulations," Wright said.
Before the enactment of these new rules, there were many ambiguous segments of the regulations.
The ambiguities caused many of the election regulations to remain unenforced throughout the election process.
Allowing the other divisions of the University to enforce their original regulations frees the hands of the election committee so they may focus on candidacy and the election process, Wright added.
Prior to this year, the election rules have been included in the bylaws of Council.
But this year, they were eliminated from the bylaws and are now included in a set of rules that must be passed by Council each year.
The new election rules will go into effect for the spring Council elections held online between Feb. 26 and March 1.
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