Elections for Carleton Academic Student Government (CASG) representatives, which were scheduled to begin Sept. 22, have been delayed a week.
CASG is a separate student government from the Carleton University Students’ Association, dealing mainly with the academic interests of the student body.
There are roughly 100 students who are elected as representatives to act as intermediaries between students, faculty and administration, and deal with academic, non-political issues concerning mainly undergraduate students.
The delay was imposed by the Senate electoral officer who runs the election, who needed additional time to consult with individual departments about the number of representatives they wanted, said James Splinter, president of CASG.
“I think the transparency of CASG needs to be more apparent to students, so that they’re aware that such representation exists in their faculty. It’s important that they have representation in order to enact change and address their academic concerns,” said Stephanie Brooks, a second-year journalism student running for the position of journalism representative.
However, many students are unaware or apathetic to CASG’s existence, with the average voter turnout for a CASG election sitting at about 8 per cent of the student population.
“We’re running more interesting campaigns this year to get students interested,” Splinter said.
In the upcoming academic year, CASG is “trying to make course outlines available in advance, for one,” Splinter said.
“We’re also trying to bring about public access to grades, so that students can know how they’re doing in relation to other students. They would be able to find out class averages, highest and lowest marks, which we feel would be better for standardizing the way courses are graded,” Splinter said.
Despite CASG’s academic plans for students, Chief Electoral Officer Dean Tester said one reason for the low voter turnout and uninformed student body is the limited campaigning involved in the election.
“Because we are an academic student government, we try to maintain an academic focus in our election,” Tester said.
“There is limited campaigning because we don’t want candidates to be missing class to do so. It is mostly a word-of-mouth election, but we do encourage students to campaign through means like Facebook, talking to friends, class talks, etc. Students can also submit write-ups of themselves that are posted on the website beforehand,” Tester said.
Elections for CASG representatives will begin on Wed. Sept. 30, and will continue until Fri., Oct. 2 online. Voting reminders will also be sent out to students through their Carleton Connect e-mail accounts.