With the ASUO general election two weeks away, ASUO President Jay Breslow has used his authority to place two measures on the ballot.
Breslow has rubber-stamped ballot measures for OSPIRG and the Multicultural Center — OSPIRG’s to renew its funding for next year and the MCC’s to create an $18,555 cultural programming fund.
The deadline for ballot measures to be filed with the ASUO Elections Board passed 5 p.m. Friday. By that time, one measure was in the board’s possession and the other was pending approval from the ASUO Constitution Court.
OSPIRG’s measure to renew its student incidental fee funding for next year is officially on the ballot, as far as Breslow and Matt Swanson, Elections Board office manager, were aware. The measure jumped through all the necessary hoops — court approval and a signature from Breslow — in time to meet Friday’s deadline.
However, the Multicultural Center’s measure still must pass another obstacle before attaining official ballot measure status: The court must approve its structure and wording.
The court rejected the MCC’s first draft of its measure Thursday because the structure did not follow ASUO rules governing ballot measures.
In light of the time crunch, Justice Ahsan Awan provided the group with a sample structure for its measure that would be accepted if was turned into the court, essentially cutting the time the MCC would have had to work on fixing the structure.
Breslow, who is placing the group’s measure on the ballot through his referendum power, rewrote the measure “pretty much exactly” according to the structure provided in Awan’s decision. He turned in a copy to the board by the Friday deadline along with a memo explaining that it still had to pass through the court.
Breslow did not hire an elections coordinator until the beginning of this term, which has meant a short elections timeline and deadlines that are not so much set in stone as lightly placed down. Chief Court Justice Robert Raschio said the final word on the deadlines that must stand, and those that can be loosened will come from Shantell Rice, elections coordinator.
While the MCC measure is technically past the deadline, Swanson said, he was unsure whether that would affect the board’s acceptance of it.
The MCC has “made the effort to turn it in,” Swanson said. “Once [the court says] something, the issue of the deadline may or may not apply.”
The MCC measure was intended to create a cultural programming fund to help groups bring people and events to campus, Breslow said, and it fits nicely with the center’s mission to be an umbrella organization, helping out all the groups it can.
Breslow was a co-director for the MCC before becoming ASUO president, and he said he thinks the programming fund is a great idea because it will bring people to campus with ideas that are not traditionally heard.
“It’s not specific to race or class or gender,” Breslow said. “It’s that really ambiguous word of ‘diversity.’”
The Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group’s measure had an earlier start than the MCC’s. Breslow also placed it on the ballot through referendum, but OSPIRG still decided to gather signatures in support of its effort.
The more-than-3,000 signatures the group members garnered were pledges of support for OSPIRG, said Jessica Smetana, the group’s campus organizer.
OSPIRG also took down phone numbers of those students who signed pledges so that group members could call some of them before the election and remind them to vote for the measure.
OSPIRG is a student group funded by the incidental fee, but it goes to the ballot every other year to renew its funding at the University rather than go through the ASUO Programs Finance Committee.
This, Smetana said, follows in line with OSPIRG’s mission.
“We believe in advocating democracy,” Smetana said. “It just makes a lot of sense to give students the opportunity to have a voice.”
In another aspect of the elections, candidates have filed for 10 of the open Student Senate seats, while three others have no candidate and are open for write-ins.
To have a successful write-in campaign for the senate, Swanson said, a person must receive at least 25 votes to be considered a candidate.
To be considered for the office of ASUO president, a write-in candidate must garner at least 75 votes, and for all other positions, write-ins must receive at least 10 votes.