The ASUO (Associated Students Of The University of Oregon) office is located in the Erb Memorial Union 004. (Sebastian Flores/Emerald)
Of the roughly 23,000 University of Oregon students who were eligible to vote in the 2025 Associated Student of the University Oregon’s Special Election, 97 did. The election, which brought major structural and financial changes, happened quietly with the voter guide being released one day before the 48-hour election period began.
Each year, ASUO holds a winter term special election to vote on technical changes to the ASUO constitution. The planning for this year’s election began on Oct. 16, 2024 when ASUO Senate President Taliek Lopez-Duboff introduced the call for a work group to determine what would be on the ballot for the election. The working group was adopted soon after on Oct. 30, 2024, officially launching the election cycle.
There were two questions on the 2025 ballot, according to the voter guide. Question One, the “ASUO Elections Reform Package,” and Question Two, “Senate Academic Committee and Seat Names,” were both approved by voters.
Question One, which introduced the largest changes for students, codified standardizing spring election dates, made amendments to Elections Board procedures and adopted ranked-choice voting — a system that had previously failed to pass in a statewide initiative during the 2024 election.
Assistant Professor of Political Science at UO, Chandler James, said the system gives voters a wider chance to accurately show their beliefs by ranking each candidate, rather than just picking one.
“It’s a more accurate reflection of the electorate’s beliefs,” James said. “However, one of the drawbacks is that not everybody knows how to use ranked-choice voting or is familiar with it, and so it can be costly in terms of the transition.”
Lopez-DuBoff said implementing ranked-choice voting was an important change to avoid lengthy runoff elections as seen in prior years.
A runoff election occurs when one candidate fails to secure 50% of the vote. Since oftentimes there are multiple candidates vying for the same ASUO positions, runoffs have drawn out the spring elections process for days and sometimes weeks. In the 2024 elections, 77% of elections went to a runoff.
“There were a lot of issues with the runoffs and ASUO elections last year. It gets kind of messy, right?” Lopez-DuBoff said. “We wanted to find a way to streamline that (and) make the elections more accessible to students.”
Ranked-choice voting will effectively eliminate runoff elections by allowing students to rank their choices, ensuring a majority winner is determined in a single round of voting.
“When you have three, four, five (or) six candidates, you’re going to get a runoff. That’s just how numbers work,” Elections Board Member David Mitrovčan Morgan said. “You’re just accepting that you’re gonna have two elections every time. No voter wants to deal with that.”
Voter turnout has been a consistent issue for ASUO elections. While just 1,476 students voted in the 2024 special election, that number was significantly higher than this year’s turnout — 97 votes or about 0.004% of the student body.
“I haven’t heard anything about the ASUO special elections, even though I receive communication from UO in multiple formats like email and Instagram,” Avery Smith, UO junior, said.
When asked why voter turnout was so low this year, Mitrovčan Morgan said “controversy” was the difference.
Mitrovčan Morgan referenced the 2024 special election campaign that modified the way student organizations receive funding. Oregon State Public Interest Research Group took issue with the proposed measure, starting a “vote no” campaign. Soon after a “vote yes” campaign rivaled it.
“Two strategic and motivated campaigns competing against one another offers voters an alternative. It offers them a choice between two options,” James said. “They are strategically responding to each other with the goal of obtaining a majority of winning and they’re trying to build diverse coalitions.”
The higher turnout according to Mitrovčan Morgan was the controversy over the measure — something he said was missing from this election season.
This year’s ballot had no bills that were “controversial” and “no campaigns whatsoever,” he said.
“It was mostly a procedural edits of procedure,” Mitrovčan Morgan said.
Mitrovčan Morgan cited that the ASUO has to stay neutral in the ballot measures, saying it limits their options to boost voter turnout or promote voting.
“The board has to stay perfectly neutral. The best that we can do is, ‘Hey, there’s an election going on, it’s important, you should vote,’” Mitrovčan Morgan said. “Which is not anything compared to a candidate or a campaign manager.”
One main avenue for the ASUO to announce and educate voters on the ballot is through the voter guide, which explains the various proposed reforms. While, Mitrovčan Morgan pointed to a lack of controversy as the cause of low turnout compared to last year; another potential cause was that ASUO published the 2024 Voter Guide two weeks before the election, while in 2025, it was released just one day before.
According to Mitrovčan Morgan, the late release was because the ASUO members themselves didn’t know what would be on the ballot until a week before the election.
The five member judicial branch, which is the ASUO Constitutional Court, must approve all ballot measures before going on the ballot; those members take two recesses throughout the school year.
According to the court’s rules, winter recess begins on the first Monday in December and continues until the second Monday in January.
In 2025, Constitution Court came out of recess a week early, Lopez-Duboff said, publishing their ASUO Reform Package January 8th.
The resolutions crafted by the working group, however, specifically called for the special election to take place during week three of the term, giving the Election Board 13 days to publish what was going to be on the ballot.
“We were faced with the decision of, do we make all the deadlines prior to that recess so that we don’t have to figure anything out, right? Or do we try to jam everything into three weeks of procedures?” Mitrovčan Morgan said.
Lopez-Duboff said he called for the election to be earlier in the term to make sure the Election Board had time to prioritize both the special and regular election.
Another major priority of the election board is increasing the number of candidates participating in the spring election. Moving away from a system that allows more than two candidates to run was “step one”, Mitrovčan Morgan said.
“When I was just a commissioner last year, there was no considered effort of, how do we advertise to people that they can run?” he said.
This year for the spring elections, the campaigning period has been expanded to 53 days from Feb. 17 to April 11, in order to give candidates time to interact with voters. In 2024, campaigning opened April 1, and with run-offs concluding April 11, giving students just days to learn about campaigns.
“What gets people to vote is candidates going out there and campaigning, two weeks is not enough for any campaign,” he said.
With the goal to remove barriers of entry that were “unnecessary”, the need for signatures to run for Senate positions was eliminated, and the election board began various workshops to get candidates interested and voter information.
ASUO spring elections will occur from April 7-11.
*Voting results of prior and current elections are accessible to view for UO students through the Engage platform with their UO login.