Raise your hand if you know that midterm elections are on Tuesday. Keep your hand raised if you’re planning on voting, whether in Missouri or your home state. Congratulations—you’re one of just 37 percent of people who are of voting age in our country if 2010’s turnout data carries over to 2014.

Now, raise your hand again if you know that Tuesday also signifies elections for Student Union. Again, keep it raised if you’re planning on voting. An even more hearty congratulations for this group—only 22 percent of students voted for SU last year, and based on the dearth of advertisements around campus telling people to vote and the accompanying dearth of information regarding the elections, it doesn’t appear that that figure will increase significantly this year.

Last year’s turnout percentage was down from that of both 2011 and 2012. Only 1,470 students voted—down nearly 300 total voters from just two years prior. This year, seemingly little has been done to reverse this downward trend, with even more students flocking to Facebook to publicize their campaigns, often at the expense of any physical reminders.

The different candidates for Student Union perhaps don’t present wildly diverging platforms, so it’s easy to think that whichever candidates are elected won’t significantly change SU’s inner workings. But there is a cost to the seemingly campus-wide disinterest in Tuesday’s SU elections.

For one, SU actually does affect some aspects of student life on campus, most notably through Treasury. Most students’ voiced memories of experiences with SU are limited to frustrating interactions with Treasury, which result in their annoyance at not getting full funding for their clubs.

A common refrain heard around national, state and local elections is that people shouldn’t complain about their governments’ policies when they don’t exercise their right to help choose their elected officials: don’t complain, essentially, if you didn’t vote in the first place.

The same could be said for SU elections. As this line of thinking relates most closely to students’ interests, it would help complaints about Treasury resonate if those students in charge of budget allocations were truly representative of the student body’s interests.

A Treasury seat isn’t particularly difficult to gain—last year, for instance, only 10 candidates ran for 11 open seats, leaving the last slot a battle of write-in candidates. And with the vast power Treasury wields in splitting money amongst the hundreds of student groups on campus, it behooves students to actually pay attention to what kinds of interests will be represented among this board. If they don’t like what they see, a write-in campaign has proved fruitful in the past.

SU elections also influence each undergraduate school’s Senate demographics, giving every student a vested interest in, at the very least, becoming informed about which students will be making decisions affecting their future on this campus.

So go get an “I voted!” button on Tuesday—for elections both inside and outside the Washington University bubble.