Election Day took on extra meaning for Washington University students this Tuesday as polls also opened for Student Union Treasury, Senate, block funding and various constitutional amendments.

At 35.4 percent or 2,370 voters, the final turnout for SU elections had the highest voter turnout for fall SU elections in recent history, also slightly surpassing Missouri’s turnout of 35.2 percent for the midterm elections.

Although turnout was high relative to previous fall election figures, such as last fall’s 22-percent mark, it still falls far below the spring election turnout rate. According to senior and SU President Emma Tyler, this is due to the spring ballot having nearly twice the number of candidates.

“Spring elections still have a much higher voter turnout, with almost 50 percent, and I think for next fall the goal will be to get it up to that point,” Tyler said. “But it still shows a really positive change from last fall.”

With 19 candidates running for only 11 positions, this year’s election for Treasury was more competitive than in the previous few years. A year ago, only 10 candidates ran for 11 seats, meaning the last slot was filled by the top write-in candidate.

SU Election Commissioner and freshman Savannah Rush was in charge of candidate recruitment and overseeing the logistics of various election-related tasks. Rush thought the revival of SU’s recruitment and retention committee might have contributed to the increased competition for Treasury elections.

According to Rush, the committee has been meeting every other week since returning this year, working on the goals of increasing voter turnout and making the elections themselves more competitive.

“[The committee has] been a great help with getting the word out on elections, recruiting specific people who we feel would be great in certain positions, encouraging people to run, handing out flyers and things like that,” Rush said.

Senior and SU Vice President of Administration Vivek Biswas chaired the recruitment and retention committee and also believes it contributed in part to the success of this year’s election. Not everyone had been in favor of the committee in the past, however.

“Some of my predecessors in my position believed that SU as a whole should be a recruitment and retention committee, which I still believe as well,” Biswas said. “But reviving the committee and having a dedicated task force towards recruitment and retention was very helpful. We saw it in our turnout numbers and the number of candidates running for some positions.”

The Senate ballot, however, didn’t face the same level of competition as Treasury. The School of Engineering & Applied Science had two candidates running for two seats, the John M. Olin School of Business had three candidates for three seats, the College of Arts & Sciences had five candidates for six seats, the Sam Fox School of Architecture had one candidate for one seat and the Sam Fox School of Art didn’t have any candidates to run for its one seat. Several write-in campaigns, however, were held for those who missed the deadline to be on the ballot.

All groups requesting Block Funding this year were funded. The groups were the Emergency Support Team, Campus Y, Habitat for Humanity and Uncle Joe’s.

All of the proposed constitutional amendments were also passed.

Tyler said that, of the constitutional amendments, she was most excited about the decision to update the constitution to make it gender-neutral. The pronouns ‘he’ and ‘his’ were previously used throughout the document.

“Other schools have done this, too. The use of ‘they’ and ‘their’ is kind of the best practice, so we put it on the ballot, and we’re really excited it passed,” Tyler said.

Other constitutional amendments modified the role of the Diversity Affairs Council chair and granted the Speaker of the Senate the power to appoint a senator if a Senate seat becomes vacant between elections.

Although voter turnout was higher than usual, many students did not feel the need to participate in SU elections.

Freshman Maximilian Cetta was among the students who didn’t vote.

“I didn’t really feel like my vote mattered. I wasn’t familiar with most of the candidates anyway, so it would have felt pretty arbitrary if I did,” Cetta said.

Treasury candidate and freshman Chris Hall said one of the most important issues in the election was to increase the awareness of the student body to what goes on in Treasury. Though he was not elected, he wanted to promote student government awareness.

“It’s important to care about who you elect,” Hall said. “It’s your student activity fee, which means 1 percent of your tuition that gets totaled up for all the clubs you may want to participate in.”