Tuesday Hadden | Student Life

Twenty-nine point two percent  of Washington University students voted for Student Union (SU) this year, a 6% increase from the 23.4% that voted in the Spring of 2022.

The increase in voting can be attributed to changes in the voting platform, increased social media presence, and a new co-campaigning policy. In addition to increasing voting turnout, SU had more students run for Treasury this year than for Senate. 

Election Commissioner, Junior Constantin Carrigan, partially attributes the high turnout for SU Treasury to the “blowback” Treasury received for their funding decisions this year, such as funding conservative commentator Amala Ekpunobi.

Carrigan said that the overall uptick in voting can be attributed to the Election Commission’s decision to switch voting platforms from WashU Group Organizer (WUGO) to the faster and more streamlined BigPulse Voting to improve the voter experience.

“The new platform is very quick to vote on,” Carrigan said. “It’s a 30-second ballot.”  

Carrigan also said that SU has made efforts to increase the number of voters and to do more online outreach to students so their votes are more well-informed. 

“We did do a lot more when it comes to making sure emails are sent out,” Carrigan said. “We had a lot better social media presence than we’ve ever had before on the SU social media.” 

According to Carrigan, however, the biggest factor in increasing voter turnout was likely a new election policy allowing co-campaigning that began this year. Co-campaigning, often referred to as slating, is when multiple candidates run together on a slate, though voters retain the ability to vote for individual candidates regardless of slate.  

Carrigan said using slating in this year’s election was a “massive success” in increasing voter turnout and improving voter experience.

Although slating is not used in many official governmental elections and is criticized by some for encouraging individuals to vote along party lines rather than for individual candidates, Carrigan believes it is useful for SU’s elections since they lack political parties. 

Carrigan also said that slating is beneficial for internal SU operations.

“[Co-campaign partners] learned to work together over these past few weeks in order to get their campaigns off the ground,” Carrigan said. “Now, I think they’ll walk into a situation with a lot more cohesion, no matter who wins.” 

However, student groups who endorsed candidates frequently endorsed candidates from different slates, indicating that Washington University students did not entirely stick to slates.

First-year Elena Wierich said that she didn’t adhere to slate voting in this election and instead chose candidates based on their individual platforms. She said that she sees the value in slating, though. 

“If I had had somebody who I had a connection to in one of the groups, then I probably would have voted for everybody in the group,” Wierich said. “That just didn’t happen.” 

Although overall voter turnout increased from last year to this year, students aren’t required to vote for each position, so they often skip some, according to Carrigan. The highest voter turnout is for SU President. 

Carrigan said that the SU Election Commission hopes to increase voter turnout by connecting more with students through social media and providing additional resources to make voters more informed in the coming years. 

Wierich said that SU could better emphasize the difference between candidates to show voters that there are “high stakes” in SU elections, which she believes would make students more motivated to vote.

“A lot of times you see a flier, and it says the person’s name and then a photo of them,” Wierich said. “But what’s different between them and the person next to them? [SU should] differentiate between candidates so that you actually care about who’s running.” 

Carrigan added that SU hopes to increase transparency about internal operations to make students more invested, which he believes could result in higher voter turnout. 

“Once people start to understand what we do, maybe they’ll vote, maybe they won’t,” Carrigan said. “But to that extent, I think people need to actually care about these elections. We see a lot of uproar about voting decisions made by SU … If you don’t want that to happen, you can vote.”