The ASUO will officially begin allowing candidates for its 2010 election to file today, giving students the first look at the people aiming to represent them in the 2010-11 school year.
The final informational meeting for candidates, held Monday night, made clear that the approach to the process will be different this time around. While in 2009 the ASUO was proud of a spike in the number of students who signed up to run, a rash of resignations from those who came to power in that election has led officials to instead caution those interested in running about the amount of work they face.
When ASUO Senate President Nick Gower spoke to the roughly 50 interested students who had come to hear about the positions they would begin applying for, he issued a forceful warning to those whose interest was merely casual.
“You learn invaluable experiences in the ASUO,” he said. “If you don’t stay in your position, you’re letting the student body down. If you’re here thinking it will be easy, then I do want to discourage you.”
It was a statement Elections Coordinator Nolan Gary echoed, and many of the ASUO office-holders in the audience nodded their heads in affirmation. But both said getting elected itself was not terribly difficult for many positions.
“I was elected with 50 votes,” Gower said. “Only 50 votes. I tied for 50 votes and the other guy dropped out. So it’s not hard to get elected. It only took 50 votes. It’s kind of scary.”
But Gower and all of those who spoke also emphasized the valuable experiences they’d gotten in the ASUO.
ASUO Chief-of-Staff Ella Barrett said she had been involved with the ASUO since her first day at the University. She said her best experience was realizing, after a successful 2006 lobbying effort on behalf of higher education funding, the extent of the ASUO’s influence.
“That was the work of students,” she said. “That was the work of the ASUO.”
Gary encouraged students who were unsure they could handle the pressures of an election to work on other students’ campaigns, which Barrett and others said paved the way for their appointed offices in the ASUO.
That was part of a more open and accepting discussion of the political dynamics of the ASUO than had been aired during previous elections — as, for instance, a similar meeting in 2009 when then-Elections Coordinator Aaron Tuttle implied that then-President Sam Dotters-Katz had only been elected because he sold cut-price pizza slices on campus.
Both ASUO President Emma Kallaway and Vice President Getachew Kassa claimed to have “the most awesome job in the ASUO,” but they acknowledged the difficulty of getting there.
“Never lose who you are,” Kassa advised those thinking of running for president or vice president. “Because (‘president’) is just a title, it’s just for a year, and afterwards it’s still you.”
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