Sori Kim pays $3,168 per term to attend the University. For her, as for any student who takes classes full-time at the University, $195 of that is the student incidental fee, which funds the ASUO. But unlike nearly every student at the University, Kim can’t vote in the ASUO’s elections.
Kim, who is from South Korea and speaks little English, still relies on the ASUO’s services. She said she rides the bus regularly, which University students can do for free because of a contract between the ASUO and the county bus system. But she and the more than 200 other students in the University’s American English Institute, an English language immersion program, have no say over the student bus passes or any of the other programs they help pay for through the ASUO. As far as anyone can remember, AEI students never have.
It’s something the ASUO’s elections officials are trying to change.
“Basically, we want people on this campus to be able to vote,” Elections Coordinator Nolan Gary said.
But it is unclear what, exactly, is the reason behind the fact that AEI students are unable to vote and who has the final say over whether they should be allowed to do so.
Gary said he doesn’t know who it is, but he has been talking to those in the University’s Department of Student Affairs about it. University spokesperson Julie Brown said the feeling among those in the department is that the ASUO’s Elections Board, which Gary heads, has the final say.
To complicate matters, the University doesn’t count AEI students as officially enrolled, meaning they have not been accepted to the University and cannot attain degrees from it until they are accepted.
The ASUO also posts its ballots online via DuckWeb, but most AEI students never use DuckWeb because the Institute’s classes do not use it for class registration, unlike other parts of the University, AEI admissions coordinator Martine Wigham said.
Gary said he has been working on getting the vote for AEI students for weeks, but he still doesn’t have clear answers on why they can’t vote and whether the University considers
them eligible.
AEI students’ inability to vote went mostly unnoticed until the 2009 election, when it came to light shortly before results were about to be published. Then, students at the Institute discovered they could not vote in the election and told their friend, Phil Gong, who was running for a contract-negotiating position in the ASUO.
Gong told then-Elections Coordinator Aaron Tuttle, and Tuttle decided to hold off on the results until the 600 combined students in the AEI and the Community Education Program, another program for students not pursuing degrees, were allowed to vote.
University officials later told Tuttle that CEP students had been allowed to vote and that AEI students could not. At the time, it was thought that AEI students paid only part of the incidental fee, as CEP students and students not enrolled in classes full-time do. The results were published without AEI students’ votes.
However, that is false, Wigham said.
“They basically pay what the U of O students pay,” she said, adding, “I don’t know why they’re not allowed to vote.”
Gong encouraged the University to find a way for the AEI students to vote, citing parts of the ASUO’s governing documents that guarantee voting power to everyone who pays the fee.
“All those programs are provided by the ASUO,” Gong said. “They can take advantage of it and they pay for it, so they should have some say.”
It’s unlikely AEI students’ votes would impact the ASUO much. They comprise only a small segment of the students who pay the fee. Gong won his race anyway. Most of the schoolwide races in the 2009 general election weren’t close enough that the result would have been different, even if every single AEI student had voted for the losing side.
That alone is unlikely.
International students as a whole rarely participate in the ASUO.
Gong, who is from China, was the only student running in the 2009 election who identified himself as an international student. Kim herself said that, despite her reliance on the bus, it doesn’t bother her that she can’t vote.
“Some students are maybe interested about that,” she said. “But me? No.”

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