Sophomore Sonal Churiwal will remain the Speaker of Student Union (SU) Senate after receiving 53.12% of the vote to keep her seat in a specially held recall election with high voter turnout from students, April 10. 

On March 26, a petition was released calling for Churiwal to be recalled from her seat, which she is slated to serve until the Fall 2024 Semester. The petition uploaded anonymously to Washington University’s Group Organizer (WUGO) website alleged that Churiwal abused her power, violated neutrality rules, and created a “culture of fear.” On April 3, senior Constantin Carrigan, SU Election Commissioner, emailed students and stated that the petition had received the necessary signatures — 5% of the student body — to be put to a vote in a special election. 

Carrigan said that the voter turnout was higher than general SU elections by roughly 0.2% with a total of 2,210 students, and noted that voting was only open for 24 hours for the recall election, as opposed to the 48-hour time window for general elections. In the Spring 2024 election, the highest individual race saw 1,872 votes. 

“This is the first time this has been done in my tenure here — not even in office, just during my time at WashU,” Carrigan said. “We were really kind of going off on nothing. We decided on no rules. The Election Commission wasn’t really that involved in it, outside of physically running the election.” 

In his email to the student body that officially opened voting, Carrigan wrote that while there were no specific rules for the election, students were still bound by the University’s code of conduct. 

“I strongly encourage everyone to operate with the utmost respect for all parties involved,” he wrote.

Two student-written opinion submissions were published in Student Life before the election began: one written by Churiwal and the other from sixteen student organizations on campus asking students to vote to retain Churiwal.

Churiwal told Student Life that she did not make decisions about her advocacy based on electoral results. 

“If I was concerned about electoral results, I never would have written [the] Boeing resolution, because it was at the same time as the Student Union race,” Churiwal said. “While I’m glad that I’ll have the opportunity to continue to do work through Senate, I wouldn’t regret it if I was recalled for pro-Palestine actions.”